Therapies offered

Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT)

CAT is a time-limited therapy (normally 16-24 sessions). Working together the client and the therapist consider learned behaviours or beliefs from the client’s past and whether they contribute to current difficulties. The therapist and client work collaboratively to identify repeated patterns and coping mechanisms and the client is supported to find different ways of addressing problems. CAT relies on an empathic relationship between the client and the therapist which supports the client to be more open about the way they feel and how they live their life. CAT can often help with issues such as addictions, anxiety, depression, disordered eating, obsessions and compulsions, phobias, relationship issues, self-harm, and stress.

Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing

This therapy helps people recover from distressing events and problems the event causes, like flashbacks, upsetting thoughts or images, depression or anxiety. When a person is involved in a traumatic event, they may feel overwhelmed and their brain may be unable to fully process what is going on. The memory of the event seems to become “stuck” so that it remains very intense and vivid. The person can re-experience what they saw, heard and smelt and they may feel the distress they felt whenever the memory comes to mind.

EMDR aims to help the brain “unstick” and “reprocess” the memory so that it is no longer so intense. It also helps to “desensitise” the person to the emotional impact of the memory, so that they can think about the event without experiencing such strong feelings. It does this by asking the person to recall the traumatic event while they also move their eyes from side-to-side, hear a sound in each ear alternately, or feel a tap on each side of their body alternately. The effect may be similar to what occurs naturally during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, when your eyes move rapidly from side to side as the brain processes the events of the day. These side-to-side sensations seem to effectively stimulate the “stuck” processing system in the brain so that it can reprocess the information more like an ordinary memory, reducing its intensity.

EMDR can be very effective very quickly and the effect can be long lasting. Although some people will need more treatment sessions than others.