Mental Health
Counseling options available:
Talk Therapy
Talk therapy can help you work out how to deal with negative thoughts and feelings and make positive changes. Talking about your thoughts and feelings can help with times when you feel troubled about something. If you turn a worry over and over in your mind the worry can grow.
But talking about it can help you work out what is really bothering you and explore what you could do about it.
Talking therapies give people the chance to explore their thoughts and feelings and the effect they have on their behaviour and mood. Describing what’s going on in your head and how that makes you feel can help you notice any patterns which it may be helpful to change.
It can help you work out where your negative feelings and ideas come from and why they are there.
Understanding all this can help people make positive changes by thinking or acting differently. Talking therapies can help people to take greater control of their lives and improve their confidence.
Expressive Therapy
The use of the creative arts as a form of therapy. The process of creation is emphasized rather than the final product. Expressive therapy is predicated on the assumption that people can heal through use of imagination and the various forms of creative expression.
It is believed that through creative expression and the tapping of the imagination, a person can examine the body, feeling, emotions and his or her thought process. The use of art via collage and drawing, writing and sewing are available.
EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an integrative psychotherapy approach that has been extensively researched and proven effective for the treatment of trauma. EMDR is a set of standardized protocols that incorporates elements from many different treatment approaches. EMDR uses a structured eight-phase approach to address the past, present, and future aspects of a traumatic or distressing memory that has been dysfunctionally stored. The patient recalls a traumatic event while simultaneously undergoing bilateral stimulation that can consist of moving the eyes from side to side, vibrations or tapping movements on different sides of the body, or tones delivered through one ear, then the other, via headphones.
Hypnotherapy, Guided Imagery, Relaxation
Hypnotherapy is a therapy to assist people to find meaningful alternatives to their present ways of thinking, feeling or behaving which maybe challenging. Hypnotherapy can also help one become more accepting both of oneself and others and can be useful in promoting personal development and unlocking inner potential. It is a two way process between the therapist and the client- a professional partnership. A person cannot be hypnotized unless he or she agrees and co-operates. This cannot be stressed enough.
The hypnotic trance is still something of a mystery. It is not “sleep” but seems to be a state of focused concentration or awareness similar to the experienced in mediation or daydreaming.
Theoretically, during hypnosis, the conscious mind is “deactivated”, allowing the unconscious mind to be accessed directly. We do our everyday thinking with our conscious mind, but is is merely the tip of the iceberg; most of our behaviour is determined by our unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is programmed by our experiences and by what we are taught by our parents, teachers and peers, but it is rather like a robot: once it has been programmed, it can also be readily achieved through hypnosis.