What is psychotherapy
There are many different types of psychotherapy. They are all ways of helping people to overcome stress, emotional problems, relationship problems or troublesome habits. What they have in common is that they are all treatments based on talking to another person and sometimes doing things together. They are the "talking treatments". Sometimes it is just being able to talk to an impartial listener that evokes change. The essence of this relationship that exists between client and therapist is its non judgmental nature.

Behavioural psychotherapy
This tries to change patterns of behaviour more directly. Patients can be helped to overcome fears by spending more and more time in the situation they fear, or by learning ways of reducing their anxiety. They may be given 'homework' exercises, and asked to keep diaries or to practice new skills between sessions.
Behavioural psychotherapy is particularly effective for anxiety, panic, phobias, obsessive-compulsive problems and various kinds of social or sexual difficulty. Relief from symptoms often occurs quite quickly.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Like behavioural psychotherapy, it aims at changing thinking patterns directly, but like psychodynamic psychotherapy it encourages discussion of how we think and helps us to get rid of destructive ways of thinking. It does not focus very much on the past - more on the present and future and has achieved particular success in the treatment of certain types of depression.

Family and Marital Therapy
People's problems will often not be theirs alone, but are often the result of relationship problems in a marriage, partnership or family. By focusing very clearly on the relationships involved, and by involving all the people concerned, family and marital family therapy seek to help those relationships to work better.

Can these different approaches work together?
These are all very different sorts of treatment, but they all help us to understand better how we work, which can help us to make changes in our lives.
I, very often, use a combination of techniques to suit the individual, and clients may progress from say individual to group therapy, or marital work to individual treatment.

What actually happens?
Psychotherapy usually involves regular meetings at the same time, same place every week or two weeks. In most cases the length of the treatment will be during a session is, of course, totally confidential agreed within a couple of weeks or so of starting the therapy. What happens

In group therapy, several people with similar sorts of problems meet regularly with a therapist or therapists. These sessions may be longer than in individual psychotherapy. Group therapy may appear less intimate, but it is not a cheap or second-rate treatment - in fact it is the best treatment for some problems. The experience of discovering one is not alone, and of being able to help other people, is powerfully encouraging and is often the first step towards getting better.

In marital therapy, a therapist or pair of therapist will meet with a married or committed couple so that they can work on their problems jointly.

In family therapy, the whole family will be involved usually talking over their difficulties with a pair of therapists.