Question: What is ACT therapy?

ACT therapy (or acceptance and commitment therapy) is an action oriented and mindful approach to working with thoughts, emotions, and behaviour. It is related to CBT but different in some key ways. It is proven to work well with a broad range of emotional difficulties, trauma and living with physical pain.

Often people feel stuck in difficult thoughts and feelings, which leads to unhappiness. ACT acknowledges that there is pain in life but despite the suffering you are experiencing, meaningful moments can still happen. ACT will give you tools to be able to notice and let go of unhelpful, racing thoughts and be effective during your day, even in the presence of suffering.

ACT uses a range of practical tools including mindfulness exercises, to train ourselves to stay in the present moment, not allowing our mind to drag us back to regrets, or forward to worrying. It teaches us how to make space for big emotions and not to avoid them, or situations which trigger them. It helps us learn how to unstick from difficult thoughts and not be pushed around by them. You will learn more about your values (the desired qualities of your behaviour which enable you to act like the kind of person you want to be). Your values can serve as a guide in working through problems and making decisions. Therapy can empower you to make committed actions towards moving your life in line with your values.

Question: What is EMDR?

EMDR is Eye movement, desensitisation and reprocessing therapy, a therapy for working on traumas and painful life events. This is very useful for PTSD, birth trauma, road traffic accidents, assaults, witnessed or experienced violence to name a few.

Imagine a filing cabinet inside your mind. Non-frightening memories are neatly filed away. However, when we undergo a traumatic event, the brain freezes the memory and stops it from being processed like other memories. It is as though the files get thrown on the floor. Then, as you continue to live your life, different triggers such as sounds, smells or certain people can reactive the files and you begin to reexperience the event as if it were happening now.

In EMDR we take a painful memory and process it using bilateral stimulation (stimulating the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain). For example, asking you to use your eyes to track my finger moving side to side in front of you. This happens whilst you think about the difficult memory and requires next to no talking about the memory. The eye movements happen for 20 seconds and then we check in with each other to see what you noticed.

It is thought that this eye movement reduces anxiety in the brain and when the anxiety is reduced, it enables people to be able to start making new connections with the memory. In turn, enabling them to understand the events that have happened to them and not be impacted by them in the same way. It is an evidence based, effective therapy.

Question: What is CBT?

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a therapy that can help you manage your struggles by changing the way you think and behave. It is based on the concept that your thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and actions are connected, and that negative thoughts and feelings can trap you in a vicious cycle.

CBT focuses on noticing what is happening to your thoughts and actions, challenging the content of those thoughts, and changing your actions. This occurs through setting tasks to try and tracking your progress.

CBT is useful for most mental health difficulties but especially in depression and OCD.

Question: What is Compassion Focussed Therapy (CFT)?

CFT targets shame and self-criticism, which is now known to underlie most forms of emotional distress and mental health difficulties. CFT focuses on practical ways to develop your ability to be increasingly compassionate to yourself and others. In turn, compassion can help generate emotions which can change our thought patterns.

It will help you understand your three affect systems, threat, drive and soothing and understand how an imbalance in these systems can lead to problems.

Question: How many sessions will I need?

This is a hard question to answer. Firstly, my aim is to get my clients to their therapy goals as soon as we can.

However, the number of sessions depends on several factors such as:

  • what your goals for therapy are
  • How severely your life is being impacted by your current difficulties
  • How long have you had your current difficulties
  • How much you would like to work between sessions to practice and implement the ideas we have come up with

I can answer this question in more detail during the 15-minute free conversation I offer all potential clients. Click here to book in!