Clinical supervision

Integrative psychotherapy draws on more than one tradition rather than following a single school. A therapist working integratively has usually trained in depth in one approach and added others, and chooses between them according to the person in front of them rather than applying one method to everyone.

Cognitive behavioural therapy looks at the links between what you think, how you feel and what you do. The premise is that patterns of thinking can keep difficulties going, and that changing what you do can change how you feel.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is interested in how earlier experience, much of it outside everyday awareness, shapes present relationships and choices. It pays particular attention to patterns that repeat.

Transactional analysis offers a plain vocabulary for what happens between people — the roles we fall into, the scripts we learned early, and the exchanges that leave us feeling small or stuck.

Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing was developed for trauma. It works on the basis that some memories are stored unprocessed, so that they continue to intrude with the force of the original event.

Gestalt therapy attends to what is happening now — in your body, in your awareness, and between you and the therapist — rather than mainly explaining the past. The aim is contact with experience as it actually is.

Play therapy is therapy for children conducted in the medium children actually use. Rather than being asked to explain feelings in words they may not have, a child plays, and the therapist works with what emerges.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is the most exploratory of the talking therapies. It works slowly and in depth with unconscious processes, and is usually open-ended rather than fixed to a number of sessions.

Psychosexual therapy addresses sexual difficulties and the emotional and relational context around them. Work may be with an individual or a couple.

Relational psychotherapy takes the view that people are formed in relationship and are best helped in one. Rather than the therapist standing outside as an expert, the connection between the two of you is treated as the main instrument of the work.

Hypno-psychotherapy uses hypnosis — a state of focused attention — to work with the subconscious, most often on unwanted habits, limiting beliefs, anxiety and sleep.

Humanistic psychotherapy starts from the view that people have their own capacity to grow, and that the therapist's task is to provide the conditions in which that becomes possible.