Different Types of Counseling
Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) - A form of talk therapy that aims to help people overcome trauma, loss, or other serious emotional challenges. AEDP aims to help clients uncover and draw on innate coping mechanisms to manage their trauma and move toward flourishing.
Art Therapy - With the use of creative techniques people use drawing, painting, collage, coloring, or sculpting to help express themselves artistically and examine the psychological and emotional undertones in their art.
Christian Counseling - Offers emotional and relationship support that draws on the principles of Christianity to help people cope with challenges.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) - Offers people a short-term form of psychotherapy directed at present-time issues and based on the idea that the way an individual thinks and feels affects the way he or she behaves. The focus is on problem solving, and the goal is to change clients' thought patterns in order to change their responses to difficult situations.
Common Elements Treatment Approach (CETA) - Helps people who experience disability or low productivity due to mental health problems strengthen their ability to contribute to the well-being of their families and communities.
Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) - Helps people who struggle with the shame and self-criticism that can result from early experiences of abuse or neglect. CFT teaches clients to cultivate skills in compassion and self-compassion, which can help regulate mood and lead to feelings of safety, self-acceptance, and comfort.
Culturally Sensitive Therapy - Emphasizes the therapist's understanding of a client’s background, ethnicity, and belief system. Therapists can incorporate cultural sensitivity into their work to accommodate and respect differences in opinions, values, and attitudes of various cultures and different types of people.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) - Provides people with new skills to manage painful emotions and decrease conflict in relationships. DBT specifically focuses on providing therapeutic skills in four key areas: Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness.
EMDR Therapy - Is an integrative psychotherapy and uses a technique called bilateral stimulation to repeatedly activate opposite sides of the brain. EMDR seems to help the brain reprocess the trapped memories. Therapists often use EMDR to help clients uncover and process beliefs that developed as the result of relational traumas, or childhood abuse and/or neglect.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) - A short-term form of therapy that focuses on adult relationships and attachment/bonding. The therapist and clients look at patterns in the relationship and take steps to create a more secure bond and develop more trust to move the relationship in a healthier, more positive direction.
Family Systems Therapy - A form of psychotherapy that helps individuals resolve their problems in the context of their family units, where many issues are likely to begin. Each family member works together with the others to better understand their group dynamic and how their individual actions affect each other and the family unit as a whole.
Gestalt therapy - A client-centered approach to psychotherapy that helps clients focus on the present and understand what is really happening in their lives right now, rather than what they may perceive to be happening based on past experience. Clients learn to become more aware of how their own negative thought patterns and behaviors are blocking true self-awareness and making them unhappy.
Hypnotherapy - A guided hypnosis, or a trance-like state of focus and concentration achieved with the help of a clinical hypnotherapist. This trance-like state is similar to being completely absorbed in a book, movie, music, or even one's own thoughts or meditations. In this state, clients can turn their attention completely inward to find and utilize the natural resources deep within themselves that can help them make changes or regain control in certain areas of their life.
Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) - A time-limited, focused, evidence-based approach to treat mood disorders. The main goal of IPT is to improve the quality of a client’s interpersonal relationships and social functioning to help reduce their distress. IPT provides strategies to resolve problems within four key areas.
Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) - A form of psychotherapy that addresses the behaviors of all family members and the way these behaviors affect not only individual family members, but also relationships between family members and the family unit as a whole. MFT may also be referred to as couple and family therapy, couple counseling, marriage counseling, or family counseling.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) - A modified form of cognitive therapy that incorporates mindfulness practices such as meditation and breathing exercises. MBCT therapists teach clients how to break away from negative thought patterns that can cause a downward spiral into a depressed state so they will be able to fight off depression before it takes hold.
Motivational Interviewing - A counseling method that helps people resolve ambivalent feelings and insecurities to find the internal motivation they need to change their behavior. It is a practical, empathetic, and short-term process that takes into consideration how difficult it is to make life changes.
Person-Centered Therapy - A non-authoritative approach that allows clients to take more of a lead in discussions. The therapist is there to encourage and support the client and to guide the therapeutic process without interrupting or interfering with the client’s process of self-discovery.
Play Therapy - A psychotherapeutic approach primarily used to help children ages 3 to 12 explore their lives and freely express repressed thoughts and emotions through play. The goal is to help children learn to express themselves in healthier ways, become more respectful and empathetic, and discover new and more positive ways to solve problems.
Positive Psychology - Emphasizes traits, thinking patterns, behaviors, and experiences that are forward-thinking and can help improve the quality of a person’s day-to-day life. The goal of positive psychology is not to replace those traditional forms of therapy that center on negative experiences, but instead to expand and give more balance to the therapeutic process.
Psychodynamic Therapy - An in-depth form of talk therapy based on the theories and principles of psychoanalysis. But psychodynamic therapy is less focused on the patient-therapist relationship because it is equally focused on the patient’s relationship with their external world.
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) - A short-term form of psychotherapy that helps identify self-defeating thoughts and feelings, challenge the rationality of those feelings, and replace them with healthier, more productive beliefs. REBT focuses mostly on the present time to help understand how unhealthy thoughts and beliefs create emotional distress which, in turn, leads to unhealthy actions and behaviors that interfere with your current life goals.
Relational Therapy - A therapeutic approach based on the idea that mutually satisfying relationships with others are necessary for one’s emotional well-being. This type of psychotherapy takes into account social factors, such as race, class, culture, and gender and examines the power struggles and other issues that develop as a result of these factors, as well as how they relate to the relationships in a person’s life.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) - Concentrates on finding solutions in the present time and exploring one’s hope for the future to find quicker resolution of one’s problems. This method takes the approach that you know what you need to do to improve your own life and, with the appropriate coaching and questioning, are capable of finding the best solutions.
Strength-Based Therapy - A type of positive psychotherapy and counseling that focuses more on your internal strengths and resourcefulness, and less on weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings. This focus sets up a positive mindset that helps you build on you best qualities, find your strengths, improve resilience and change worldview to one that is more positive.
Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) - Addresses the specific emotional and mental health needs of children, adolescents, adult survivors, and families who are struggling to overcome the destructive effects of early trauma. TF-CBT is especially sensitive to the unique problems of youth with post-traumatic stress and mood disorders resulting from abuse, violence, or grief. Because the client is usually a child, TF-CBT often brings non-offending parents or other caregivers into treatment and incorporates principles of family therapy.
Additional information of these and other types of therapy can be found at Psychology Today Website