Psychological approaches we may draw on in working together:
Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
CBT is helpful in understanding the way our thoughts affect how we feel and the subsequent actions we take.
Much of how we experience the world is governed by thoughts below the level of our conscious awareness – often they are not accurate or helpful thoughts.
CBT can help you become more aware of the automatic thoughts that drive your daily experiences and the core beliefs that shape the way you approach your life. As these thoughts rise to your conscious awareness, you are in a position to challenge them and evolve them to a truer understanding that best serves you now.
The behavioural component to CBT recognises that it’s when we put new thinking into action in our lives that we have the opportunity to integrate it as knowledge about how things actually are, rather than a theory or something you are trying to achieve.
ACT/Mindfulness
This is an approach to living designed to increase your psychological flexibility. It is based around six process that interact, known as the hexaflex – accepting your current life experience, defusing difficult thoughts and feelings, being in contact with the present moment, understanding your values and acting in line with what’s important to you in life and knowing that you are more than your experiences.
It recognises that difficult things happen in everyone’s life that we need to develop an ability to be present with, without adding unnecessary stress. And that the act of doing this brings us into contact with the power of the present moment and greater choice over our actions, supporting us to move towards the things that are important to us in life.
Schema therapy
Is helpful when long term patterns just seem to keep playing out, which can often be the case if you have trauma in your past.
Schema therapy sees life experiences imprinted as combinations of thoughts, feelings, memories, images and sensations that come together under certain themes, such as mistrust or abandonment. It recognises that some things you can’t just “think your way out of” – it can help to look, feel, experience and interact with these schemas, in order to evolve them to something more helpful and true.
DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy)
Strikes a balance between accepting your current reality, warts and all and acting to change, sometimes in only small ways, the things you are able to change. It is helpful for anyone struggling with strong emotions and works through four areas of skill development – mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness.
Positive psychology
Is the science of flourishing in life. Based on the work of Martin Seligman, it recognises five key domains of life central to wellbeing – positive emotion, engagement or flow, relationships, meaning and purpose and accomplishment.
Positive psychology approaches support you to identify and develop your character strengths and utilise them to create a meaningful and pleasurable life.
Transpersonal psychology
Refers to the realm of human experiencing that exists beyond the personal and takes into account the desire for a soulful life and a broader spiritual context.
It grew from the work of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow in the humanistic field and recognizes that via self-actualisation people move beyond the needs and agendas of the individual self into a self-transcendent experiencing or consciousness.
Eco-psychology
Is a newer school of psychology that recognizes the deep ecology that exists between all life forms. It states that true healing of the human spirit can only occur when working in harmony with our natural environment, recognising ourselves as part of the larger whole. Conversely, by seeking individual fulfillment at the cost of the planet we are simply spinning our wheels while the planet slowly dies.
“I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. … The whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine.”
-Robinson Jeffers
Call 0423 167 376.
Details on session fees, Medicare, location and more here.