Therapeutic Approaches at Join Psychology
A Safe, Strong and Trusted Therapeutic Relationship
The foundation of psychological therapy is in a safe, strong, trusting therapeutic relationship within which your individual needs can be understood, heard and healed. Clinical psychologists use something called psychological formulation which uses evidence-based psychological ideas to understand your difficulties and then develop a ‘road map’ or plan to help you heal and move forward. There are always valid and important reasons for every person’s struggles; they key is to understand, unpick and heal them together in a safe, trusting therapeutic relationship.
Strengths-Focused
All therapeutic work should balance understanding the challenges you experience, alongside your strengths. Sometimes when life is hard, we lose sight of our strengths and therapy is where you can rediscover and reconnect with your inherent strengths and abilities. So, what does this look like in practice? Here are some ways that I will help you to reconnect with your strengths in therapy:
- Reflecting on your strengths in therapy – we will talk together about your strengths and the times you have succeeded and felt proud of yourself. There are always strengths to be found in a persons’ life and I’m passionate about helping you to find and reconnect with them!
- Hearing from important people in your life – we may ask the important people in your life about your strengths.
- Looking out for strengths throughout therapy – we focus our attention on little wins and glimmers of progress and hope, alongside understanding the problems you’re experiencing.
- Enhancing strengths – we may use EMDR therapy and/or some aspects of EMDR therapy to identify and enhance your strengths by pairing them with bilateral stimulation to lock in a felt sense of your strengths.
Psychologists may use a number of different approaches to make sense of a person’s needs and help them move forward in their lives. I primarily take an attachment, trauma and systemically-informed approach in my therapeutic work and you can learn a bit more about what this means, below.
