How Do I Know What Kind of Therapy To Try?
Welcome to Part 1 of our Therapy 101 Series! Over the next few weeks, I will be decoding the different types of therapy, how to find a therapist, payment options, and the mystical client-therapist relationship to help you find, finance, and feel supported in your wellness goals. At Sonatina, we believe in making therapy, mental health care, and wellness accessible to our community. While it often looks like sliding scale payments, scholarships and accessible facilities, it can also look like sharing our “insider knowledge” to help people make educated decisions about what they need.
To start, we will be unraveling the letter soup and technical jargon behind all the different kinds of therapy. We love an acronym to describe our approach to practice and our credentials (CBT, DBT, MT-BC, MFT, LCSW, LPC, on and on and on). While it is easy to people familiar with the mental health care system, these can look incredibly daunting. What do they mean? Why does it matter? What if I pick the wrong one?
Types of Therapy
CBT (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy): A short-term, problem-focused type of therapy with solution-based interventions. CBT focuses on the interplay of thoughts, behaviors, and emotions and their effect on the present. Sessions are structured and include interventions to change negative thoughts, restructure your thought processes, and activate behavioral change. They often include self-monitoring of thoughts/behaviors outside of sessions. CBT is generally considered effective within a range of 5-20 sessions.
DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy): A type of CBT developed to include a focus on interpersonal relationships. DBT focuses on cultivating mindfulness, understanding current situations, and developing self-acceptance in order to generate change. Sessions are structured and include interventions to increase distress tolerance, facilitate behavior change, and help you self-regulate.
Expressive Arts: Expressive arts therapies include creative arts therapies like dance, drama, art, and narrative therapy. They focus on multimodal forms of creation to facilitate mind-body connections, support self-exploration, and cultivate self-expression. Expressive arts therapies are process-oriented, meaning that the experience of creating, rather than the final product, is where most of the therapeutic content lies.
Family Systems: Focused on the family unit’s context, relationships, and impact on a person’s life. It can be practiced individually, with couples, or in family groups. Sessions revolve around family experiences, power dynamics and communication with the belief that “what happens to one member of a family happens to everyone in the family.”
Humanistic: Person-centered and strengths-focused approaches to therapy. They are meant to be holistic: supporting an individual in all aspects of their life. The therapist provides less structure and directives within sessions to allow you to collaborate and self-direct session topics and goals. They aim to create change through increased self-awareness.
Psychodynamic: Psychodynamic therapies are emotion-focused and long-term approaches to therapy. The therapist provides little structure to allow for free exploration of the unconscious mind, dreams, and memories. Sessions are very reliant on a strong and trusting client-therapist relationship to connect with deep emotions and discover common themes.
Approaches to Practice
These terms can be applied to many different types of therapy and represent ideas that influence a therapist’s approach to practice.
Multicultural: Multicultural therapist address the effects of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and other marginalizing factors on our lives. There is a strong focus on cultural awareness, power, privilege, and the systems that work to oppress or uphold our position in society. There is an emphasis on the connection between wellness, life experiences, and power.
Person-Centered: Person-centered therapists put the client’s desires, goals, and strengths at the forefront. They use less structure and fewer directives and listen with unconditional acceptance to help clients explore self-image and self-acceptance.
Trauma-Informed: Trauma-informed therapists approach all of their work by assuming people have experienced traumatic events. They are often well-versed in the neurobiology of trauma, grounding techniques, and tailoring their work to the individual triggers and needs of each client to take into account the wide effects trauma can have on development, behavior, relationships, and mental health.
Maybe some of these approaches resonated with you. Maybe you are curious about what else is out there. Maybe this helped you make sense of your current therapeutic environment. I hope this was a helpful first step in understanding a few of the types of therapy out there. Do you have a question about therapy? You can ask it in this Google form to be answered later in the series.
Up next week: How can I find a therapist and what do their different therapist credentials mean?