Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT - which is pronounced as the word 'act') uses a wide range of experiential exercises (including mindfulness) to undermine the power of destructive cognitive, emotive, and behavioural processes. It helps clients to fundamentally change their relationship with painful thoughts and feelings, to develop a transcendent sense of self, to live in the present, and to take action, guided by their deepest values, to create a rich and meaningful life. ACT gets its name from one of its core messages: accept what is out of your personal control, and commit to action that improves and enriches your life.

Cognitive Analytic Therapy

CAT stands for Cognitive Analytic Therapy; a collaborative programme for looking at the way a person thinks, feels and acts, and the events and relationships that underlie these experiences (often from childhood or earlier in life). As its name suggests, it combines aspects of cognitive and analytic therapies in order to provide an more effective therapy. It is a time-limited therapy - between 4 and 24 weeks, but typically 16 sessions.

The heart of CAT is about building a trusting relationship with your therapist in order to work successfully together to explore your current difficulties. This will allow you both to explore the underlying difficulties in terms of your early life and relationships, understand how you have learned to survive these difficult feelings by relating to yourself and others in particular ways and discovering the ways of doing things differently to make your life better for yourself and those close to you. It also focuses on how to continue to move forward when the therapy has ended.

COgnitive Behaviour Therapy

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a talking therapy focused on understanding how our thoughts, emotions and behaviour are connected. The aim is to identify unhelpful patterns of thinking and behaving which are linked to your difficulties and to consider alternatives which help to bring about change. 

CBT is recognised by the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as being an effective therapeutic approach for a range of difficulties, including anxiety, depression, panic, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), sleep problems, and long term health conditions.

Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing

Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of traumatic life experiences. 

When traumatic events occur, your brain’s natural way of coping can be overwhelmed. This means that the distressing experience may not be processed properly and the memory becomes frozen. When these unprocessed memories are triggered, a person can re-experience the same intensity of feeling that they felt at the time of the traumatic event. This can cause considerable distress and make it difficult for people to live fully in the present.

The aim of EMDR therapy is to enable the brain to process the distressing memory in a
natural way such that it loses its painful intensity. This results in the reduction of suffering and symptoms and helps to develop new coping mechanisms that can support psychological health/growth.

EMDR involves an eight-phased approach to address past, present, and future aspects of a
stored memory. Bilateral stimulation (side to side eye movements, tapping, or auditory
tones) are used to enable the processing. EMDR is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) as an effective treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In addition to its use for the treatment of PTSD, EMDR has been successfully used to treat a wide range of psychological difficulties which may have developed following adverse or traumatic life experiences.