Anxiety Management
This includes time with a trained, skilled therapist in which there will be an in depth examination of your everyday stresses in life, personal life stresses and stresses in your working environment. They offer to devise strategies to help you readapt to your particular life style or make changes in them where needed. This will lead to helping you learn ways of relieving those stresses and evolving new coping strategies.
Counselling
This is a generic term. There are different forms and techniques involved. In general, counselling is a process through which you can explore your feelings and discuss the conflicts that arise in your life.
Strictly speaking all counselling will be a professionally crafted conversation with a trained person designed to improve your own awareness how your problems affect you and then equip you to deal with them better.
Most counselling is brief and commonly for a limited period - once or twice a week of up to 12-14 sessions. Counselling is rarely prolonged for up to a year or more.
Relaxation Therapy
This is a treatment technique you can learn from a skilled therapist. It helps to control anxiety and stress symptoms. It needs to be practised daily. The different techniques in relaxation therapy include deep muscular relaxation/progressive muscular relaxation, breathing exercises, meditation, yoga and Alexander Technique.
Psychotherapy
In this more intensive form of counselling your personal conflicts are explored in depth and then help you relate them to your present behaviour and emotional response pattern. This form of treatment is more intensive than counselling and a typical session can last up to 50 minutes. It can be structured for anything up to 5 times a week when dealing with more complex issues.
Psychoanalysis
This is a relatively rare but very intensive form of psychotherapy. This is the form of treatment in which you lie on the therapist’s couch and relate to your analyst. There are different schools of psychoanalytical thoughts eg: Freudian, Jungian, Klinean etc. Treatment is non directional and can last several years. This treatment should only be undertaken by a trained Psychoanalyst and can be very beneficial for certain types of disorders, including multiple personality.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Of all the psychological treatments, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has the best established evidence base for its effectiveness. Study after study has shown that CBT is now the preferred treatment for conditions such as Depression, Panic Attacks, Anxiety Disorders, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and related conditions, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Eating Disorders, relationship difficulties and marital problems, and occupational stress.
CBT combines two very effective, tried and tested methods of Psychotherapy - Cognitive Therapy and Behaviour Therapy.
The features that characterise CBT include:
- The patient is actively involved. Working as a partnership, the patient is guided by the Therapist
- The sessions are structured and goal orientated
- Patients are encouraged to practice their new behaviours and follow homework assignments
- Patients keep diaries to raise awareness and identify factors which precede or follow difficulties they have which may either provoke or maintain the difficulties
CBT is educational, focussed and targets change.
Most people who need Therapy need to change some aspects of their lives. CBT is designed to find out just what needs to be changed. The person’s difficulties are not only explained but they are helped to overcome them.
The Cognitive aspect of CBT is aimed at restructuring the destructive patterns of thinking - their beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, images and ideas.
The behavioural aspect is when the patient meets the challenges in their lives with clarity, with a more relaxed approach so that the desired outcome can be achieved.
- CBT can be used alone or, as is often the case in combination with appropriate medication. Research has shown that this is most effective in Depression and Anxiety.
- CBT and appropriately chosen medication, when each is used alone, are almost equally effective during the period of treatment.
- Whether relapse after the end of treatment is more likely when only drugs have been used. CBT therefore provides the development of the strategies and emotional management skills that are needed to maintain well being.
- CBT therapy takes place on a weekly basis and may last from 6-15 plus sessions. However the course is individually tailored to what best suits the client.
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