Clinical Psychology
What is a Clinical Psychology?
A Clinical Psychologist aims to improve your well-being and mental health, to resolve or help with troublesome behaviours, beliefs, compulsions, thoughts, or emotions, and to improve relationships and social skills.
Drawing on effective psychological therapy approaches, this therapy can help you to overcome the issues that have brought you to therapy and help you live a more fulfilling and stable life.
CBT – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy looks at the links between how we think about a situation (cognitions) and how this affects the way we act (Behaviours), and in turn how our actions can affect how we think and feel.
The aim of CBT is to help you to ‘catch’ unhelpful thoughts and notice thought patterns that cause you distress and upset, consider alternative thoughts, and change the way you respond to situations so that the outcome is more positive or effective.
CBT is a collaborative therapy; you come to therapy as the expert in your own experiences and the therapist works with you to help apply CBT ideas and tools to your difficulties to help you overcome them.
DBT – Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy encourages you to learn to tolerate and manage distressing feelings without doing anything self-destructive.
You will learn how to step back from unhelpful thoughts and feelings; learning to keep your moods more stable overall; and learning about healthy relationships and healthy self-esteem. Mindfulness is a core component of DBT.
EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing
EMDR is a highly effective therapy that helps you to reprocess trauma, grief and pain through the use of stabilizing techniques and eye movements.
The aim of EMDR therapy is to aid the information processing system in our brains to rapidly make helpful connections that help heal past traumas and integrate them into the rest of our life experiences. This means you can move forward towards your goals with the help of an experienced EMDR therapist without being held back by past experiences.
What to expect?
Expect a supportive and professional consultation with a complete and comprehensive therapy plan. The plan will include a detailed assessment; making sense of your difficulties using a psychological framework, setting achievable goals for therapy.
You will learn skills to help you manage your emotions effectively and how you can apply these skills to your everyday life, as well as support in how to maintain gains once your therapy ends.
Assessment is normally over two sessions and treatment tends to be between 6 and 20 weekly sessions.