October 19, 2020
When people think of psychotherapy, they often visualize Dr. Sigmund Freud holding a note pad with his client lying on a couch facing away from him. While it is true that there are still some professionals who utilize Freud’s form of psychoanalysis, there are many different types of psychotherapy that exist to aid in the healing process.
In this article, we will examine together five different types of psychotherapeutic techniques and how they can help you heal.
Different Reasons for Seeking Help
As I indicated in the last article on psychotherapy, there are many reasons to seek help from a mental health professional. Some seek help for comparatively minor issues such as quitting smoking or weight loss, but a large majority look for assistance because of traumatic life events they cannot process on their own.
Traumatic memories and life experiences happen to everyone throughout the course of our lives, and most of these we can work through on our own. These events may include the death of a loved one or the loss of a job.
However, sometimes these seemingly ordinary losses create an internal reaction that causes huge problems and needs to be addressed professionally. These events may include the two reasons listed above, or rape in either childhood or adulthood, and other types of violence perpetrated against our person.
The consequences of these life experiences are sometimes followed by major depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, dissociative disorders, and a myriad of other problems. It is when these problems arise and harm our quality of life, that it is vital to seek help.
Five of the Modalities Used to Aid Healing
Upon doing my research on the different types of psychotherapeutic treatments, I came across a plethora of listings. These treatments range from traditional talk therapy to using a model called Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) where the therapist teaches their client how to use a tapping technique on their bodies to alleviate stress, anxiety, and give insights into cognitive dissonance.
(In case you might be wondering, cognitive dissonance is a theory first proposed by Dr. Leon Festinger, Ph.D. that describes how our beliefs and behaviors, if inconsistent or conflicting, often lead to humans using different coping strategies to reduce their inner turmoil. However, if these coping strategies are unhealthy, they cause problems throughout one’s life.)
In the following paragraphs, we will explore five of these techniques of psychotherapy, how they help, their limitations, and where you can find them.
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