Psychological Therapies

Cognitive Behavioural Therapies
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a talking therapy that focuses on the way you think, feel and behave in order to help you cope with difficulties you might be facing. At its core, CBT understands that our thoughts, feelings, bodies and behaviours are all intrinsically connected. When we have difficulties in any one of these areas, it automatically affects the others, sometimes resulting in a vicious cycle where people feel trapped by a problem.

CBT helps people to identify and then disrupt these vicious cycles by intervening at multiple levels to allow positive change to happen. It currently has the widest evidence base of all of the talking therapies and has been shown to be an effective way of treating a number of different mental and physical health conditions.

Third Wave Therapies/Third Wave CBT
These therapies include acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), mindfulness, and compassion focused therapy (CFT). Whilst pure CBT is often focused on helping people to enhance their problem solving skills, not all problems can be easily solved. These therapies therefore shift the emphasis away from the thoughts, feelings and behaviours and instead focus on the relationship that we have with them. This shift seems quite small but it has significant implications for what we do in therapy and how we work with your difficulties. Third wave therapies actively move away from the idea that certain coping styles or emotional experiences are pathological or ‘wrong’. Instead they focus on helping you feel more at ease with yourself and the world, and more attuned to the things that really matter to you when deciding how to behave or react.

Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy (DIT)
Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy or DIT focuses explicitly on relationship problems. It enables you to deal more effectively with those problems and, in doing so, helps distressing symptoms to improve. There is a growing body of scientific evidence demonstrating the benefits of this approach.

DIT is a time-limited and structured psychotherapy, typically delivered over 16 weekly sessions. It aims to help you understand the connection between the experiences that are currently troubling you and what happens in your relationships. You and your therapist work together to identify repetitive patterns of relating which can be traced back to childhood. Once these core patterns are identified, they will be used to make sense of difficulties in your relationships in the here-and-now, and help you understand how they contribute to your psychological distress. This understanding will be the main focus of discussion and reflection and you will be encouraged to make positive changes in your present way of managing your life.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
Psychodynamic psychotherapy aims to helps us better understand ourselves within a safe therapeutic relationship.  We all develop habits in our thoughts, feelings, relationships, and behaviours in response to our earlier experiences. We are not always fully aware our own patterns though, so this approach can help increase our awareness of them with the aim off avoiding a repetition of anything unhelpful. Ideally this leads to improvements across our lives and relationships.

On occasions some children or young people may benefit from a psychodynamic psychotherapeutic approach being incorporated into their therapy. With children, this type of treatment might include the use of toys and play, which can be a powerful way of communicating for this younger age group.

Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR was initially developed to help people experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). EMDR has a good evidence base and is now considered a gold standard in trauma treatment. Research has taught us that traumatic memories are organised in a particular way in the brain. They are isolated from other memories, which means that they can return in an unpredictable way, causing sudden and significant distress when they do. During the session the EMDR therapist guides a client’s eyes in a bilateral movement to activate both right and left brain hemispheres. This movement helps the brain to access, integrate and desensitise the traumatic memories. Other bilateral stimulation methods can also be used such as, tapping either side of the body, or listening to sounds alternately in each ear.

EMDR specialists are now helping with more than just trauma, and also work with difficulties such as chronic pain, phobias, anxiety disorders, addiction and weight loss.

All EMDR clinicians within IPC receive ongoing high quality EMDR supervision, ensuring that people who seek help from us can be assured that they are receiving safe, ethical and evidence based care.

Systemic & Family Therapy
Family therapy, also known as family, systemic and couple psychotherapy, helps people in close relationships to help each other. It views difficulties as often arising between people and within relationships. The approach enables family members, couples and others who care about each other to express and explore difficult thoughts and emotions safely, to understand each other’s perspectives and to better appreciate each other’s needs. Family and couple therapists support families to build on resources they already have and make useful and long-lasting changes in their relationships and their lives.

Family therapists work with individuals, couples, families and different forms of kinships. Research has shown that couple and family therapy can be effective for a range of difficulties.

Our family therapists work with individuals, couples, families and different forms of kinships. Many of our clinical psychologists also use these approaches and integrate systemic skills and thinking into other models of therapy, such as CBT.

Clinical Hypnosis
Clinical Hypnosis gives positive ideas or ‘suggestions’ to help resolve issues that people would like to change. A calm and focused state is induced, which increases an individual’s responsiveness to these new ideas. Research suggests that hypnosis is most helpful when integrated into a CBT intervention. A growing body of evidence indicates the benefits of using it to help with a range of conditions, including pain, fatigue, depression, anxiety and phobias.

Other Therapies
Clinical Psychologists are always qualified to provide at least two psychological therapies. Some of our therapists are also trained in and influenced by other models including psychodynamic therapy, motivational interviewing, narrative therapy and solution focused therapy.