Therapies Offered
Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing (EMDR)
Do strong emotions & fears from your past still affect you today, making it difficult to move forward?
EMDR therapy helps ease distress by “re-processing” disturbing/traumatic memories, often the roots of present day fears and strong emotion. EMDR therapy can help treat, for example, trauma symptoms (e.g., flashbacks), depression, anxiety, low self-worth or feelings of shame.
Following trauma informed assessment and support, re-processing prepares clients to observe memory, or any inner experiences, whilst following the therapist’s hand, or sounds, from left to right (or tapping). This stimulates both sides of the brain, which assists its natural healing abilities to gradually re-organise distressing material into healthier memory networks.
Effectively, inner experiences become more adaptive (e.g., new compassionate perspectives, sense of safety, self-forgiveness, balanced emotion). These support a person’s daily functioning, their relationships and ability to move forward and consider the future more than before.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
Do you catastrophise or think the worst? Do you withdraw or avoid situations that keep you stuck?
By developing insights and therapy skills, CBT allows clients to get “unstuck” from unhelpful thought and behaviour patterns that get in the way of valued living. CBT explores patterns of thoughts, emotion and behaviours (“negative loops”), which keep distress, like anxiety, going (and their development resulting from past experiences).
CBT prepares clients to learn and practice a range of techniques to ease and change these negative loops, aligned to their goals. Techniques include mindfulness and relaxation, balancing negative thoughts and graded exposure.
Trauma Focused CBT is a specialised CBT, which helps clients work through symptoms, such as flashbacks, by focusing on changing their relationship with traumatic memories. CBT can also be adapted to better suit the needs of younger people and those who are neurodivergent.
Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT)
Do you constantly blame yourself and judge your feelings, even when you rationally know you deserve better?
The most important relationship we have is with ourselves. CFT helps clients nurture their “compassionate mind”; an authentic part that can be undiscovered or overshadowed by the “threat mind” especially under stressful conditions (where anxiety, shame reside). The compassionate mind, embodying qualities like acceptance, understanding, and care, can be nurtured to help clients tolerate and respond to distress with more ease.
CFT may involve exploring life story, de-shaming defence strategies such as people pleasing or addictions, guided visualisations and developing self-compassionate talk. When clients learn to bring their compassionate mind to challenges / setbacks, they experience increased empowerment, self-acceptance and ability to cope.
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Do negative thoughts, self-doubt or old narratives stop you from connecting with what’s important to you?
Using a range of therapy tools, ACT helps clients relate to inner experiences with more mindful awareness, acceptance and care. By exploring and clarifying values, ACT guides clients to engage more fully in meaningful activity whilst relating to their inner experiences with more acceptance.
ACT brings insight, mindfulness-based practice and behavioural support to develop what’s called psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility can refer to the capacity to step back and observe our inner experiences (without necessarily reacting or obeying them), giving a greater sense of choice in responses and actions taken.
