Counselling and Psychotherapy

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There are various support organizations and counselling services available to help with stress management. These range from expensive specialist stress-management experts to free stress clinics run by local doctors. Counselling is especially good for short-term problems: trained experts help you to examine the causes of problems and devise strategies to avoid negative behaviour patterns and restore a sense of physical and emotional welibeing.

Psychotherapy is used for resolving deeper, long-term emotional and psychological problems. Psychotherapy is usually offered by psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and psychiatric social workers. Psychiatric social workers are trained in treatment methods and often work as part of a treatment team in hospitals or clinics. Today psychotherapy is being practised more and more by paraprofessionals, who have less training but may be supervised by a professional or may be trained to work with specific problems using specific methods.

Psychotherapy is conducted in several formats. Individual therapy refers to a therapist's work with one person on his or her unique problem; the relationship between client and therapist may be particularly important in producing change. In group therapy, a therapist meets with a group of patients, and the interactions between patients become an important part of the therapy process.

Many different theories or schools of psychotherapy exist. Two of the more common are psychodynamic therapy and behavioural therapy.

Psychodynamic therapy

Psychodynamic therapy makes the fundamental assumption that emotional disorders are merely symptoms of internal, unobservable and unconscious conflicts between personality components. These conflicts result from unresolved family conflicts, experienced in early stages of childhood, that become reactivated in problem situations in adulthood.

The aim of psychodynamic therapies is to revive the early conflict and to transfer it to the relationship with the therapist. The symptoms are removed when the therapist helps the patient to resolve the conflict in the transference relationship.

The therapist interprets the transference to the patient and helps him or her overcome resistances to accepting the interpretation. Additional methods, such as dream interpretation or word-association techniques, are used to aid in uncovering unconscious material. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis is the primary example of a psychodynamic therapy.

Behavioural therapy

Behavioural approaches assume that all behaviour is learned. Emotional disorders are considered to be conditioned responses or habits that can be modified by the same principles of learning that govern all behaviour. From this perspective psychotherapy means providing corrective learning or conditioning experiences. Different therapy techniques are employed for remedying specific disordered behaviours. In social-skills training, for instance, patients practise handling difficult interpersonal situations via role playing.