Individual Therapies

There are many different kinds of psychotherapy. Here are three available with the team to help you change your relationship with your mental health.

PERSON-CENTRED Therapy

For many reasons we can absorb the message that we’re not enough, and that we need to be something—or someone—other than what we are (often in order to gain the acceptance of those who are important to us). These messages can leave us anxious, depressed, lost, and/or confused about who we are or what we want from our lives.

Person-centred therapy can be a helpful approach for those who are more interested in personal growth counselling, or a more supportive style therapy. It can also be helpful for those living with a mental health diagnosis (e.g., depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder), but who may not be interested in a structured treatment for that mental health challenge.

In person-centred therapy, your therapist aims to help you reconnect with a more authentic, sometimes-buried version of you. Over the course of therapy, your therapist will try to understand and share their understanding of your inner experience exactly as it is, more than offering prescriptions, solutions, or homework. Over time, this process—as well as the relationship with your therapist itself— is thought to activate our built-in tendency to pursue growth and fulfillment. It’s also thought to help us find the inner resources to become “unstuck” in life.

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy is a first-line treatment for borderline personality disorder (BPD), and it can also be helpful for those without BPD who feel like their emotions control their behaviours instead of their own wisdom.

DBT assumes that many of our mental health challenges—ranging from suicidal thinking to harmful substance use to hurtful outbursts—arise because we don’t have the skills to deal with the emotions, thoughts, and behaviours that lead to these expereinces. DBT works to empower you with just such skills. In individual DBT, your therapist works with you to help you identify what behaviours you struggle with (e.g., self-criticism, overthinking, etc.) or situations you avoid (e.g., saying “no” to others, public speaking, etc.) that prevent you from having the kind of life you want for yourself. Your therapist then supports you in tracking and targeting these behaviours each week, ultimately helping you replace them with more adaptive alternatives so you can keep pursuing a life worth living.

DBT Skills may also be learned in a DBT Skill Group, offered separately.

Prolonged Exposure Therapy

The gold standard of treatment for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Prolonged Exposure therapy is a form of cognitive behavioural therapy that helps you confront painful reminders of the trauma, process the trauma, and unlearn some of the unhelpful adaptations you may have picked up as a result of the trauma. Treatment involves talking at great length about the traumatic event, and doing special exercises between sessions called “exposures” that help you face the situations and memories you’ve begun to avoid as a result of the trauma. Through repeated exposures and retellings of the trauma story, the event—and the associated emotions—are experienced and processed so that the past finally starts to feel like it’s in the past.