Glossary of Terms

Art therapy programs believe that the creative process is healing and life-enhancing. It uses the creative process to improve clients’ mental health. It can help children and adults treat emotional issues, including anxiety, depression, family and relationship problems, abuse and domestic violence, and trauma and loss.

Attachment-based therapy applies to interventions or attachment theory to explain how a parent’s relationship with their child influences development.

Cognitive-behavioural therapy stresses the role of thinking in how we feel and what we do. It believes that thoughts, rather than people or events, cause negative feelings. The therapist assists you in identifying, testing the reality of, and correcting dysfunctional beliefs. It helps you modify thoughts and the behaviours that flow from them.

Compassion-focused therapy (CFT) is a therapeutic approach that aims to help those who struggle with shame and self-criticism, often resulting from early experiences of abuse or neglect. CFT teaches clients to cultivate the skills of self-compassion and other-oriented compassion, which are thought to help regulate mood and lead to feelings of safety, self-acceptance, and comfort.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is the treatment most closely associated with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). It helps regulate emotion through distress tolerance and mindfulness. It aims to alleviate the intense emotional pain associated with BPD.

Emotion Focused Therapy is an empirically based therapeutic approach that encourages clients to identify, express, regulate and tolerate their emotions. Emotions are signals of how things are going in their lives, whether they tell us we are in danger, have lost something, or have achieved something. Our emotions focus on the present by nature, but they’re often swayed by our past and anticipated future. EFT aims to make sense of these emotions and transform our maladaptive emotions (anger, anxiety, depression) into adaptive emotions that push us forward. Clients learn why they’re feeling a certain way and regulate their emotions by being informed instead of feeling overwhelmed or controlled by them.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is an information-processing therapy that helps clients cope with trauma, addictions, and phobias. You focus on a specific thought, image, emotion, or sensation while watching a therapist’s finger or baton move in front of your eyes. You identify what comes to mind when thinking of an image; then, you let it go while doing bilateral stimulation. It’s like being on a train; a feeling or a thought may come up, and the client allows it to pass as though they were looking out the moving train’s window.

Gestalt therapy seeks to integrate your behaviours, feelings, and thinking to align your intentions and actions for optimal mental health. The therapist will help you become more self-aware, live more in the present, and assume more responsibility for taking care of yourself.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT, is a two-part therapy that aims to reduce stress, manage pain, and embrace the freedom to respond to situations by choice. MCBT blends two disciplines–cognitive therapy and mindfulness. Mindfulness helps by reflecting on moments and thoughts without passing judgment. MBCT clients pay close attention to their feelings to reach an objective mindset, thus viewing and combating unpleasant occurrences.

Motivational Interviewing (MI) motivates you to change your behaviour and encourages exploring and confronting your ambivalence. Therapists attempt to influence you to consider making changes. It helps with problem drinking and mild addictions.

Narrative Therapy uses the client’s storytelling to indicate how they construct meaning in their lives rather than focusing on how they communicate their problem behaviours. It embraces the idea that stories shape our behaviours, and we become the stories we tell about ourselves.

The neurobiology of trauma – essentially the effects of trauma on the brain – is essential to understand because it helps break down common misconceptions and victim-blaming about gender-based violence. It allows you to understand your experiences and the aftermath differently.

Person-centred therapy allows you to take more of a lead in discussions so that, in the process, you will discover your solutions. The therapist acts as a compassionate facilitator, listening without judgment and acknowledging your experience without moving the conversation in another direction.

Generally, for children ages 3 to 11, play therapy is a form of counselling that relies on play to help therapists communicate with children and understand their mental health. Because children develop cognitive skills before language skills, play is an effective way to understand a child.

Psychodynamic therapy focuses on unconscious processes manifested in your behaviour. Its self-awareness and understanding of the influence of the past on present behaviour.

Strength-based therapy is positive psychotherapy and counselling focusing more on your internal strengths and resourcefulness and less on weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings. This focus sets up a positive mindset that helps you build on your best qualities, find your strengths, improve resilience and change your worldview to a more positive one.

REBT is an action-oriented approach focused on helping people deal with irrational beliefs and learn how to manage their emotions, thoughts, and behaviours in a healthier, more realistic way.

Reality therapy is a client-centred form of cognitive-behavioural therapy that focuses on improving present relationships and circumstances with less concern and discussion of past events. It’s the idea that our most crucial need is to be loved and feel that we belong and that all other basic needs can be satisfied only by building strong connections. It sees behaviour as choices and teaches us that while we cannot control how we feel, we can control how we think and behave.

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) concentrates on finding solutions in the present and exploring one’s hope for the future to find a quick and pragmatic resolution to your problems. This method takes the approach that you know what you need to do to improve your life and, with the appropriate coaching and questioning, can find the best solutions.

Somatic therapy is a form of body-centred therapy that looks at the connection of mind and body and uses both psychotherapy and physical therapies for holistic healing. Its practitioners use mind-body exercises and other physical techniques to help release pent-up tension that negatively affects your physical and emotional well-being.