THERAPIES OFFERED

ACT is a therapy that helps you to accept what is out of your personal control and to commit to actions that can improve your life. During this therapy, you learn both to be present in the moment and how to manage painful feelings and memories rather than trying to avoid them. This therapy can help you to focus on where, and how, you can bring your life into line with your personal values.

CAT helps you to look at often longstanding patterns of relating, and the effect these patterns have both on your relationships with others and the way you relate – and ‘talk’ – to yourself. During therapy, you develop an understanding of the ways in which you have learned to cope with what has happened over the course of your life; and how, sometimes, these coping mechanisms – often with their roots in childhood experiences - can keep you trapped in unhelpful patterns of thinking and behaviour. Often people who have been through abuse, neglect or trauma feel bad about themselves and this can affect their self-confidence, self-esteem as well as the way that they relate to others.

CAT encourages you to challenge and change your learned attitudes and beliefs about yourself and others, and helps you to find ways to make better choices to improve your relationships.

CBT is an evidence-based treatment that helps you to notice and challenge negative thinking patterns and unhelpful behavioural responses that maintain difficult emotions, such as anxiety or low mood. It is an effective treatment for a wide range of different conditions including anxiety, depression and trauma.

In the CBT model, your thoughts, feelings, physiological responses and behaviours are viewed as all being interconnected. Making changes to one of these areas therefore has knock-on effects in the other areas. In CBT, you may be asked to keep diaries or thought records to monitor your negative thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

You will then learn strategies to challenge your negative thinking and responses; and try out new behaviours to change your emotional response to situations.

CFT encourages you to learn to recognise, sit with and move towards difficult emotions. It involves allowing yourself to feel and experience your emotions, not merely talk about them. Emotional suffering is viewed as a core basic human experience which we all have the capacity to experience; yet it takes courage to allow ourselves to connect with difficult emotional states enough to enable us to heal them.

At the core of CFT is the use of compassionate mind training to help you to develop and work with experiences of inner warmth, safeness and soothing, via the development of compassion and self-compassion. 

DBT is related to, and based on, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, but it has been specially adapted for people who feel emotions very intensely. DBT aims to help you better understand and accept difficult and intense feelings; and to learn practical skills to better manage them. 

The term ‘dialectical’ implies that it might be possible for two opposite positions - that appear to be contradictory - to coexist and compliment one another. For example, accepting yourself while also changing your behaviour might appear to be contradictory but DBT teaches that it is possible to achieve both of these goals simultaneously.