Psychotherapy

What to Expect from Psychotherapy?

As with everything in life, beginnings can be both challenging and riddled with excitement. Clients frequently bring up topics associated with holding back and struggling to open up. We have listed some of the frequent worries and dilemmas:

  • Fearing the intensity and consequences of negative emotions, e.g., "This is just too much."
  • Experiences of being incapable and bodily stuck, e.g., "I don't have words for it."
  • Feeling insecure about sharing inner experiences with the therapist, e.g., "I am upsetting him."
  • Struggling with feeling disloyal to our loved ones, e.g., "What would she say if she saw me?"

Why is this important? We believe that these natural and understandable reactions need to be addressed with kindness, validated, and worked through. In Apsiha, we are big on flexible attunement, acceptance and empathy.

How to Decide What You Need?

We have made sure that the information about our services answers some of the questions you might have about the basic principles of specific approaches or what to expect in the process. Read on and feel free to contact us should you have any additional questions.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is aimed at understanding the difficulties that arise in the context of the relationship between thoughts, emotions and behaviour. Through collaborative learning and discovery, the client and therapist define individualized goals, plan and apply appropriate strategies to deal with challenges in 'here and now'. The achievement of said goals is continuously monitored and evaluated. If this sounds interesting to you, you can find more information here.

The basic assumption of this approach is that the way we think affects the way we feel, act and react. Newer directions within CBT (e.g., Acceptance and Commitment Therapy - ACT) are less focused on what we think and the focus is on how we relate to our thoughts. The focus is on activities and bigger patterns that contribute to mindful living while promoting our personal values through focused awareness and action.

Schema Therapy

Schema therapy is an integrative approach that, although based on concepts from cognitive-behavioural therapy, includes and unites aspects from different modalities and, in addition to behavioural and cognitive techniques, includes experiential and emotion-oriented techniques. Moreover, it relies on the therapeutic relationship as a mechanism of change.

The basic premise of this approach is that some of our obstinate and self-deprecating patterns are actually side effects created during childhood or adolescence as a result of the frustration due to unsatisfied basic needs. These patterns can later become a nuisance or a burden. To cope with these stubborn patterns, we sometimes develop deflating styles of coping. This approach is aimed at strengthening adaptive ways of functioning and meeting emotional needs in a flexible and fulfilling way. If this sounds interesting to you, you can find more information here.

Gestalt Therapy

Gestalt Therapy is a humanistic therapy focused on a whole person, which considers all the characteristics and distinctive traits of an individual. In Gestalt therapy, the focus is on contact and awareness, on what is happening here and now, and on patterns and processes in everyday life. The goal is to help a person become aware of what they are doing to meet their needs, what they can change and how to accept and respect oneself to achieve fulfilment and the desired quality of life.

This modality is based on the "here and now" principle, which means that the experience (difficulty) that a person wants to work on is replayed in the therapeutic process so that a person can experience and explore what is happening inside of them while they are experiencing it and explore different scenarios and possibilities. The fundamental techniques of the Gestalt approach include conversations between the client and the therapist, as well as the client talking with parts of themselves, and experiments through which the person gains new experiences, deepens their self-knowledge, and acquires new skills for dealing with challenges.

EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy treatment primarily designed to treat trauma. Traumatic experiences have specific mechanism of storing in our memory due to which every time the trauma is triggered we experience very intense symptoms and emotional disturbance. Goal of this technique is to help client reprocess trauma in order to experience it in adaptive and less distressing way.

EMDR session is structured around target memory that is basis of the symptoms. At the beginning of the session, client and therapist define goal and all the components of the memory that cause emotional distress. Using detailed protocols and procedures therapist guides a person to gradually re-enter traumatic memory while stimulating parts of the brain that can adaptively process that memory. Even though client might experience very intense emotions during EMDR session, great majority of the clients notice significant decrease in symptoms and better functioning at the end of the treatment. If this sounds interesting, you can find more information here.

Areas of expertise

We provide counselling and psychotherapy services related to:

  • Life and identity crises (relocation, ending of a romantic relationship, death of a loved one, etc.)
  • Career challenges ( job loss and/or change, job dissatisfaction, continuing education, etc.)
  • Difficulties with self-confidence and self-efficacy
  • Anxiety disorders (anxiety, panic attacks, specific phobias, etc.)
  • Depressive disorders (apathy, chronic fatigue, sadness, helplessness, etc.)
  • Posttraumatic stress disorder (nightmares, irritability, anxiety, etc.)
  • Other difficulties linked with stress and complex traumatic stress
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