What is effective therapy?
All clients want their treatment to be effective, in other words, help them to feel better, their mental health symptoms of stress, anxiety, depression, etc, reduce and eventually stop, so they can feel better. Paul works from a Human Givens psychological model using a brief, solution-focused approach is able to provide powerful and highly effective treatment with clients experiencing positive change quickly, even from the first session.
Brief
Anchor Point Therapy maintains that effective therapy should be brief, in that it should work to reduce symptoms of client distress as quickly and in as few sessions as possible. Each session is approximately 60 minutes long and for most clients, between four to six sessions is enough for them to experience real positive change and for some it’s just two sessions. Obviously, more complex problems will take longer.
Solution-focused
Also, effective therapy should be solution-focused, in that it should focus on solving the problems a client is facing in the here and now. It is not always necessary or indeed helpful for a client to spend every session endlessly digging up the past to find the ‘root’ of a problem, the latest research shows that this approach is not the most effective. Rather, a solution focused approach, finding practical and psychological solutions to problems experienced today are the most effective. Even if you are troubled by ‘traumatic’ events in your past, we will help you leave them in the past where they belong so that they no longer trouble you in the present.
Therapeutic
Lastly, effective therapy should be therapeutic in that it makes a client feel better by removing their mental and emotional health distress symptoms. It is therapeutic because, they have begun to use their innate resources positively and newly taught skills get their emotional needs met in healthy, sustainable ways.
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In many ways effective therapy is similar to taking your car to the garage to fix a problem. You may not be sure what the problem is but you can certainly feel it and hear it when you drive, you know something is not right. The garage mechanic asks you what you feel is wrong (symptoms) and does some tests, diagnoses the problem or problems and using appropriate methods and skill (interventions, techniques) fixes the problems in as few hours as possible, so that the car drives well without the problem(s). You wouldn’t expect the car to be in the garage being ‘fixed’ for six months to a year and for you to be constantly asked by the mechanic what you felt was wrong and where the car had been driven, 10, 20 or 30 years ago and by whom! Effective therapy should be similar, as brief as possible and solution focused. |
Clients come to Anchor Point and find help with a variety of conditions, such as: addictions, anxiety, anger, depression, trauma, grief, sleep, phobias, workplace stress, domestic abuse, pain, life direction coaching.
Our essential emotional needs
Combined with a brief solution focused approach is a focus on helping a person to get their essential emotional needs met. Our physical needs for food, water, warmth and shelter are well known, we need these physical needs to survive and thrive. What is less well known is that we also have emotional needs that also need to be met for us to thrive and survive. All forms of mental and emotional distress are caused when people’s physical or emotional needs not being met.
These essential needs and our innate resources to help meet them are the ‘givens’ of our human nature – this is at the heart of the Human Givens approach to treating mental and emotional health problems.
Research over decades has shown that our emotional needs for example, security, community, status, autonomy and control, competence and achievement, meaning and purpose are as vital for our wellbeing as our physical needs. We all have innate resources that help, us to get these needs met, such as the ability to build rapport, empathise and connect with other people, to learn, problem solve, remember and plan, to use our imagination productively and to be able to reflect analyse and be objective about our circumstances. It is when our emotional needs are not being met in a significant way over a significant period and our innate resources are not being used well then mental and emotional distress can develop. A Human Givens trained Psychotherapist will work with people in mental and emotional distress to identify what emotional needs are not being met, which resources are either not being used or misused and what other barriers are getting in the way of a person’s needs being met and work to overcome them.
If all our emotional needs are being met in balance, making us feel safe and confident we don’t suffer from conditions that disable us such as anxiety, depression, addictions, phobias, panic attacks and anger.
To book a therapy session, please do call or email now.
