Talking therapies can provide space to process difficult experiences and promote healing, although sometimes additional approaches are needed.
Talking therapies offer numerous benefits when people are struggling:
- Understanding: Talking therapy can help individuals understand the reasons for their anxieties or other emotional difficulties that they may not have recognised themselves. It can help people in understanding themselves, and their relationship to their difficulties.
- Emotional Processing: It provides a space to feel big feelings that might be difficult to admit or process alone.
- Supportive Relationship: Therapy offers an interpersonal, helping relationship, which is especially valuable for those lacking supportive friends or family.
- Guidance and Expertise: Therapists offer understanding and experience, helping people navigate emotional and mental distress.
- Perspective: Therapy assists in gaining clearer perspectives on problems.
- A Different Perspective: Therapists help people to navigate the world differently, offering strategies for managing life’s complexities more comfortably.
Options Beyond Conventional Talking Therapies
When talking therapy alone is not enough, other options can be explored:
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): Instead of primarily targeting symptom reduction, act therapy for anxiety focuses on acceptance, values, and committed action. ACT encourages clients to accept unwanted thoughts and feelings without judgment, using defusion techniques to notice thoughts as thoughts. ACT promotes psychological flexibility, enabling clients to adapt to changing circumstances and respond effectively.
- Mindfulness: Mindfulness practices cultivate a state of calm and focused awareness. Mindfulness helps clients to experience their anxiety without trying to fix it, promoting non-judgemental awareness of thoughts and feelings.
- Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP): NLP is a method of therapy used to change mindsets and enhance healing ability, and can be extended to virtually every real-life problem. NLP helps people develop endurance and avoid mental roller coaster whiplash.
- Psycho sensory Therapies: Psycho sensory therapies use sensory input to alter mood, sensations, thinking, and behaviour.
- Havening Techniques®: The havening technique for anxiety involves sensory input to alter the mind/body. It is a psychosensory treatment using gentle touch to eliminate unwanted feelings from distressing memories. The havening technique for anxiety is effective for relieving distress in the moment.
- Somatic Therapies: Somatic therapies can be supportive, though research support may be lacking for certain ideas within the field. They help people gain control over the residues of past trauma and regain self-mastery through physical experiences that contradict feelings of helplessness.
- Self-Compassion: Therapies such as Mindful Self-Compassion and Compassion-Focused Therapy aim to build self-kindness and reduce self-criticism.
Talking Therapy, Alternative Therapies, SFBT, ACT, Mindfulness, NLP, Psycho sensory Therapies, Havening, Emotional Healing