Therapies Offered by Empower Clinical Psychology Services.
Therapies offered largely reflect the research evidence and NICE* recommendations regarding the most effective treatment approaches for particular difficulties. However your therapy is an entirely individual process where research derived generalities inevitably fail to reach. So true to Clinical Psychology, you will not be offered a singular therapy approach or a protocolised therapy, but a thoughtful integration of psychological approaches uniquely applicable to you, within a therapeutic relationship where you can start to think about and experiment with your being, your motivations and desires, and your experience of your own aliveness.
An Introduction to Some of the Various Therapies Offered
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy
Many difficulties are well served by pragmatic cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) approaches. Indeed, CBT is the most widely supported therapeutic approach for anxiety and depressive difficulties as well as for many other mental health problems. CBT rests on a premise that how we feel may be affected by biases in our thinking (cognition) and subsequent ways of responding (our behaviours). These may unwittingly lead us into vicious cycles where things just spiral downwards. CBT aims to help people identify the thinking patterns and behavioural strategies that keep their problems going, with a view to developing more flexible and liberating alternatives.
CBT is a fairly short term, structured and goal focused approach that aims to empower people to efficiently achieve quantifiable improvements in wellbeing.
Meta Cognitive Therapy, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy, Schema Therapy, Mindfulness Based Approaches and Compassion Focused Therapy
Newer and significant developments of CBT traditions are offered, namely Schema Therapy, Meta Cognitive Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Mindfulness based approaches and Compassion Focussed Therapy approaches. These therapeutic developments are based on a broader understanding of human functioning derived from Eastern contemplative traditions, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and developmental psychology, in application to human suffering.
By way of example, metacognitive, and mindfulness based approaches can help in the development of a capacity to observe one’s mind and some of the more corrosive patterns the mind gets pulled into with a view to lifting awareness out of these tangles and into the landscape of spacious and fully embodied awareness from where more vitality and in some ways clarity as well as paradoxically a tolerance of not knowing, is approached.
Compassion Focussed Therapy (CFT) focusses on the cultivation of brain and body systems for safeness, courage, contentment, and connection. These are thought to have evolved out of mammalian care giving capacities and are specifically configured through experiences of caregiver attunenment and responsivity whilst growing up. These are significant in that research has shown their potency in settling the activation of feelings of threat which organise the body and mind in very distinctive and often unhelpful ways. Affiliative networks in contrast can promote a sense of connectedness, openness, confidence, peacefulness, and basic okayness. This is thought to be a brain state that organises the mind and body in ways that promote health and wellbeing. CFT draws on the neuroscience adage that ‘the cells that fire together wire together’ and uses various practices to stimulate and strengthen the brain and body’s soothing and safeness systems. CFT can be helpful in addressing the difficulties and complexities many people have in responding to the suffering in oneself and others with openness, warmth and skill and can be particularly indicated for people who are intensely self critical.
Other Psychological Approaches
Alongside the above, positive psychology, existential approaches, motivational interviewing, and more recently, psychoanalytic ideas are drawn upon where indicated, to help you think about your difficulties and develop a plan for your therapy.
Aims of Psychological Therapy
Whatever combination of therapy approaches are drawn upon, the aims are first, to help you get to know yourself with more clarity and compassion, both in the context of our evolutionary heritage that has endowed us with brains and minds that can at times be very problematic, as well as in the context of your own life experiences and the ways you may have unknowingly adapted to them, that hold your vitality and your relationships back.
Second, clinical psychology aims to help you develop your capacities and skills to begin to take up the reins of your mind and your relating, for you to more fully inhabit your life.
*NICE is the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. It is the advisory body that provides guidelines for the NHS regarding the most effective treatments for the full spectrum of physical and mental health problems, based on an analysis of the scientific evidence.