What type of therapy is right for you?
If you are a client seeking therapy for the first time, you may be confused by the wide variety of labels attached to therapy. Integrative, person-centered, psychodynamic, existential, and so many more.
To start, it is helpful to understand that each type of therapy is first and foremost just a conceptual approach. They are ideas of how to conduct therapy (how to help a person, how to affect change) that have been invented by a person or group of people. However, they are not static ideas that are executed uniformly by every therapist. Given this, every therapist or client’s experience of a particular type of therapy may be different, the same way that every person might cook a tomato pasta slightly differently …
Nevertheless, each type of therapy can be generally described. And this can be helpful if you have an intuition of which type of therapy feels best for you. For example:
Person-centred - a non-directive approach where the client is considered the expert of their life & leads the session, with the therapist guiding the client deepen their understanding of themselves
Cognitive-behavourial - works with one’s thoughts and behaviours in the present moment to understand and change those that are unhelpful
Psychodynamic - focuses on understanding how the client’s earlier experiences and unconscious affect their present life
Existential - a more philosophical approach that considers how existential concerns such as our mortality affect & may help guide us in life
Very rarely are these therapies mutually exclusive. And some therapies may fall (partially or fully) under the umbrella of another therapy, such as dialectial behaviour therapy often being considered to fall within cognitive-behavourial therapy. In the real world, most therapists are integrative and pull from multiple approaches as is helpful - whether deliberately or not. And clients often benefit from multiple approaches as well. There is research supporting many different therapy approaches for a wide variety of mental health conditions.
As a therapist with a person-centred foundation (but also integrates other approaches), I would risk a cliche by suggesting that clients follow their intuition as to which type of therapy or which therapist they’d like to try working with. In practice, every therapist works quite differently, even if they advertise themselves as practising the same type of therapy. And some research suggests that how comfortable you feel with your therapist is a strong driver of ‘success’ in therapy.
