When a person is receiving private anxiety treatment, they can expect a personalised and supportive therapeutic experience tailored to their specific needs. The following approaches are commonly used, detailing what’s involved and the potential benefits.
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT):
- Involved: ACT uses acceptance and mindfulness processes to help people relate differently to distressing thoughts and feelings. It also utilises commitment and behavioural change processes to help them flexibly move in the direction of a more fulfilling life. ACT encourages clients to identify their values and commit to actions aligned with those values.
- Benefits: ACT aims to enrich a human life and undermine destructive forms of human activity that get in the way of living. It helps clients develop psychological flexibility, experiential willingness, and openness. By accepting what cannot be changed and choosing to live a valued life, clients can experience a richer and more meaningful existence. It can be more effective than disputing the content of thoughts.
- Mindfulness-Based Techniques:
- Involved: Mindfulness exercises promote awareness of the present moment and acceptance of thoughts and feelings without judgement. Clients learn to observe anxiety-related thoughts and feelings without trying to change them.
- Benefits: Practising mindfulness can enhance a client’s quality of life, whether anxiety shows up or not. It helps loosen the hold that emotion regulation has on the lives of anxiety sufferers.
- Relaxation Techniques:
- Involved: Relaxation techniques aim to reduce sympathetic nervous system activation, switching off the stress response and providing physical and psychological benefits. Examples include deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, guided imagery, yoga, and Tai Chi.
- Benefits: Regular practice of relaxation helps nurture self-regulation, which is incompatible with anxiety and distress.
- Social Skills Training:
- Involved: This training aims to correct social skills deficits by using interventions such as behavioural modelling, corrective feedback, social reinforcement, and self-guided homework exercises.
- Benefits: Improved social functioning, diminished anxiety in social situations.
- Exposure Therapy:
- Involved: Gradual exposure to feared situations or stimuli in a safe and controlled environment. Encourages clients to face what their mind and body are doing during fear and anxiety in a gradual fashion to learn new ways of responding to their own responses.
- Benefits: Reduced avoidance behaviours and anxiety responses, increased confidence in managing anxiety-provoking situations.
- Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP):
- Involved: NLP works to reprogram the human mind and its responses and feelings towards different situations. It aims to understand how people organise their thinking, feeling, language and behaviour to produce the results they do.
- Benefits: NLP techniques can assist people to use anxiety appropriately and consider future events from a resourceful, calm state of mind.
- Havening Therapy:
- Involved: Havening therapy involves the depotentiation of traumatically encoded experiences in the amygdala. The therapist applies Havening Touch, and the client visualises themselves at the bottom of a staircase, walking up the 20 steps and with each step counting out loud, whilst the facilitator applies Face, Arm and Palm Havening Touch.
- Benefits: In the hands of a skilled practitioner, clinical experience indicates that Havening Techniques® can help heal amygdala-based disorders, including panic attacks, phobias and PTSD. It allows the brain to release traumatic experiences, serving as a trauma filter for present-day information processing. The use of self-havening also provides clients with a tool that helps to sustain whatever progress has been made.
Private anxiety treatment Summary
Private anxiety treatment offers a range of personalised approaches, including ACT, mindfulness-based techniques, relaxation techniques, social skills training, exposure therapy, NLP and Havening therapy, each with unique ways of addressing anxiety. These treatments aim to foster acceptance, reduce avoidance, promote emotional regulation, and improve overall well-being, enabling individuals to lead more balanced and fulfilling lives.
Tags: Private Anxiety Treatment, ACT, Mindfulness, Relaxation Techniques, Exposure Therapy, Social Skills Training, NLP, Havening Therapy, Personalised Therapy