Therapy Approaches
 

Therapy that merges mindfulness and behavioral therapy, with positive social support. It is insight-based, meaning that the therapist attempts to provide the client with insights about their inner conflicts, with the aim of helping the client develop a stronger and healthier sense of self, also called self-actualization, and attempts to teach clients they have potential for self-fulfillment. By encouraging self-awareness and reflexivity, therapy helps the client change their state of mind and behavior from one set of reactions, to a healthier one with more productive and thoughtful actions.

This approach helps individuals explore the meaning of their lives and confront existential concerns such as death and freedom. Existential psychotherapies, an application of humanistic psychology, applies existential philosophy, which emphasizes the idea that humans have the freedom to make sense of their lives. They are free to define themselves and do whatever it is they want to do. This is a type of humanistic therapy that forces the client to explore the meaning of their life, as well as its purpose. There is a conflict between having freedoms and having limitations. Examples of limitations include genetics, culture, and many other factors. Existential therapy involves trying to resolve this conflict.

A school of thought in psychology that emphasizes the importance of individual experiences, subjective feelings, and the potential for growth and self-actualization (developing a stronger and healthier sense of self. It emphasizes personal growth, self-awareness, and the client’s capacity for healing. It focuses on your unique traits and features instead of trying to identify what’s common between you and others to label these common traits as a condition. This approach focuses on how you see yourself and your world, and how these perceptions impact your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. The main goal of humanistic therapy is to help you reach your full potential by becoming more self-aware and accepting.Humanism concept: Ideal and real selves. The ideal self and real self involve understanding the issues that arise from having an idea of what you wish you were as a person, and having that not match with who you actually are as a person (incongruence). The ideal self is what a person believes should be done, as well as what their core values are. The real self is what is actually played out in life. Through humanistic therapy, an understanding of the present allows clients to add positive experiences to their real self-concept. The goal is to have the two concepts of self become congruent.

Integrative therapy is a flexible and personalized approach to therapy that combines techniques and ideas from various therapeutic schools of thought to address a client’s unique needs. It’s often seen as a more holistic approach, considering the individual’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being in a unified way. Ideally, therapist and client will work together to understand the sources of the latter’s anxiety, unhappiness, physical discomfort, or unhealthy behavior patterns. Key aspects of integrative therapy: Holistic Perspective: It aims to address the whole person, not just specific symptoms; Personalized Approach: Therapists tailor their techniques to the individual’s specific needs and preferences; Flexibility: It’s not tied to a single therapeutic model but draws from various approaches as needed; Therapeutic Relationship: It emphasizes the importance of the relationship between the therapist and client as a crucial element of change; Focus on Integration: It aims to integrate different aspects of a person’s experience, including physiological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral systems, to create a cohesive sense of self. Integrative therapy is an individualized, holistic approach to therapy that combines ideas and techniques from different therapeutic schools of thought depending on the unique needs of a given client. As such, it is sometimes seen more as a movement within the practice of psychotherapy than a form of therapy in and of itself. In practice, by merging elements of different psychological theories or modifying standard treatments, integrative therapists can often offer a more flexible and inclusive approach to treatment than those who practice singular forms of psychotherapy. An integrative therapist may introduce strategies and techniques from cognitive-behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, EMDR, motivational interviewing, mindfulness, art or music therapy, psychodynamic therapy, humanistic therapy, psychodrama, meditation, breathwork, yoga, family systems therapy, gestalt therapy, or trauma-informed therapy. How they go about it is likely to differ from practice to practice: A provider may initially follow one primary approach but introduce elements of other techniques as the therapeutic relationship progresses or when predetermined targets or goals have been met. For example, on realizing that a client struggles with social anxiety, a therapist who takes a humanistic approach to a client’s long-term goals and concerns may share techniques from CBT that specifically target the individual’s situational anxiety.