Glossary of Therapeutic Modalities

Glossary of Therapeutic Modalities

This Glossary of Therapeutic Modalities is designed to provide members of the public with a broad overview of the diverse range of therapeutic approaches that may be offered by many NCIP members. While not exhaustive, it gives a solid foundation to help you better understand the type of therapy you are considering or currently receiving. Whether you are seeking support for a specific issue, exploring deeper personal growth, or addressing past experiences, this guide can help you make an informed decision about what might work best for you.

Under the NCIP professional banner, therapists include Psychotherapists, Counsellors, and Hypnotherapists, each bringing their expertise and unique approaches to the table. They may focus on a specific modality or combine techniques to tailor therapy to your individual needs and goals.

While understanding different modalities is valuable, it’s important to remember that the most critical factor for success in therapy is the quality of the therapeutic relationship. Feeling safe, respected, and valued by your therapist lays the foundation for meaningful progress. A strong, supportive relationship fosters trust, allowing you to explore your thoughts and emotions with confidence. This connection is often what enables you to engage fully with the therapeutic process, empowering you to create lasting change and growth.

This glossary is here to help you feel informed and empowered as you embark on or continue your therapeutic journey. With the right approach and a supportive therapist, you can find the path that resonates with you and leads to healing and transformation.

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): Rather than fighting your thoughts and the feelings that come with them such as guilt, ACT teaches you to accept them and work with them, changing your behaviours, facing your fears, and committing to the process of doing so. 

• Adlerian Therapy: Developed by Austrian psychiatrist Albert Adler, this theory examines the individual and how their environment, early experiences, lifestyles, and even birth order influence them. By learning how these factors affect them, the individual can work toward a happier, more meaningful way of being. 

• Animal-Assisted Therapy: This type of therapy (see also Equine and Canine) involves working with a therapist and an animal.

• Art Therapy: A form of psychotherapy where a trained Art Psychotherapist uses visual art mediums for self-expression and communication. In the UK art psychotherapy is governed by BAAT and HCPC. (Partially taken from the BAAT website).

• Behavioural Therapy: This is a blanket term covering a range of therapies including CBT that work on identifying unhelpful behaviours and changing them. See the individual therapies listed for explanations.

• Bioenergetics Therapy: Developed by Alexander Lowen M.D., this theory links our emotional and mental health with physical health. It is based on the theory that emotional and mental distress is held as physical tension so uses breathwork, movement, touch and discussion to release this from the body https://www.lowenfoundation.org/what-is-bioenergetics 

• Body Psychotherapy: A type of psychotherapy which acknowledges the link between the mind and the body and involves the person’s physical experience, movement, and posture, and sometimes can include the use of touch. Body psychotherapy can also be called “body-oriented psychotherapy” or “somatic psychotherapy”.

• Brain Spotting: This is an alternative, yet evidence-based therapy that identifies certain spots in the client’s/patient’s field of vision to release trauma. It is different from EMDR as it focuses on the vision rather than using eye stimulation.

 www.lowenfoundation.org/what-is-bioenergetics   

• Brief Therapy: This is a blanket term for short-term therapies which focus on current issues and alleviating the symptoms. An example of brief therapy would be Solution Focused Therapy (see below).

• Canine Assisted Therapy: This therapy combines working with a counsellor alongside interacting with a dog that gives you a different way of talking through concerns, issues, thoughts, feelings, and behaviours impacting your life. Having a dog present in the room can help you feel more at ease, the space is less intense, and it provides a less threatening focus for people who struggle to talk. 

• Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT): A short-term therapy that examines the behaviours, emotions and thinking patterns a person has, identifies the life experiences that have caused these and looks at how these patterns can be changed to improve the person’s life and wellbeing

https://www.acat.me.uk/page/about+cat 

• Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy: This combines CBT (see below) with hypnosis to help clients/patients manage their distress symptoms with techniques and move forward with their lives.

• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): This is a talking therapy that focuses on negative thoughts and behaviours causing problems such as anxiety. It teaches techniques to tackle the thoughts and change the behaviour to manage the issue, but only focuses on the here-and-now issues not looking at the past.

• Creative Therapy: Instead of just talking, creative therapy uses a variety of creative ways to express how the person is feeling such as drawing, painting, writing or movement.

• Dance Movement Psychotherapy or Movement Therapy: The use of creative movement, embodiment, and non-verbal communication in the therapeutic process by a trained Dance Movement Psychotherapist. (Partially taken from the ADMP UK website)
  
  
• Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT): This is based on CBT (see above) but is adapted to help people who experience their emotions much more intensely. Instead of trying to change these emotions as in CBT, DBT teaches the person to accept and feel the emotion and then let it go. DBT tends to be on a longer-term basis. 

• Drama Therapy or Drama and Movement Therapy: The use of drama and theatre methods by a trained Drama therapist to facilitate creativity, imagination, learning, insight and growth. In the UK, drama therapy is governed by BADth and HCPC (Partially taken from the BADth website)

• Eclectic Counselling: May also be called multimodal counselling whereby the therapist uses a range of modalities or techniques specifically for the client/patient and their presenting issues and what they wish to achieve from therapy.

• Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT): This modality is based on the idea that if a person is not emotionally self-aware or suppresses or ignores emotions, this causes psychological distress.  The therapist will teach the client/patient to become aware of their feelings and listen to them as a way of stopping negative responses.

• Existential Therapy: Philosophy is brought into this therapy with the belief that emotional and psychological distress is caused by an inner conflict. It looks to relieve this by looking at the human being within the experience of existence, focusing on the present moment and how this impacts and what this means to the person.

• Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR): Most used to treat trauma, EMDR uses specific eye movements to stimulate the brain whilst processing traumatic memories. It means that these memories can be worked through and stored by the brain in a way that reduces the emotional intensity of the memory, the person feels less fearful, anxious, or distressed and will be less triggered by events.    

• Family Constellations: Working on the belief that problems within a family are passed down through the generations, this therapy allows a person to highlight these threads and work through them, so they do not continue to live with them or pass them on themselves. This is done either with just a therapist using dolls/objects to represent family members or with a group of strangers who will take on roles and work through the issue to give new understanding and perspectives.

• Family Therapy: This therapy involves the whole family, where they can talk to each other in a safe space to either understand their issues, work on relationship dynamics or support a family member through their problems. 

• Flash Technique: Like EMDR, Flash Technique uses eye movement and tapping to process trauma memories. It is a relatively new technique, but the client can process the trauma without becoming distressed and it can happen quite quickly https://flashtechnique.com/ 

• Gender, Sex and Relationship Diversity Therapy - This is an affirmative therapeutic approach working with and beyond the LGBTQIA+ communities and expanding to those involved in consensual non-monogamy, including BDSM/Kink, the Asexuality spectrum and Neurodivergence. Rooted in social justice and embracing cultural humility and cultural competence, it views the oppression caused by cisgenderism, mononormativity heterosexism and minority stress as the significant contributory factors to most mental health distress in GSRD populations. This therapy offers trauma-informed care, utilises sex-positive, norm-critical contemporary sexological perspectives and can integrate with most other core theoretical modalities Davies, D & Neves S, (2023) Gender, Sex and Relationship Diversity Therapy in T Hanley and L. A. Winter (eds) Sage Handbook of Counselling and Psychotherapy 5th edition. Sage Publications. 

• Gestalt Therapy: Practitioners trained in Gestalt Therapy work with clients/patients to help them understand how they relate to others, and gain self-awareness and different perspectives of their issues by teaching them to tune in and be aware of immediate thoughts, feelings and behaviour and the effects this has.  This is seen as a humanistic modality which is a positive and practical way of working https://gestaltcentre.org.uk/what-is-gestalt     

• Humanistic Therapy: This covers different modalities such as Person-Centred, Existential and Gestalt which are all talking therapies. They are holistic and focus on the individual reaching their potential through exploration and self-development.  

• Hypnotherapy: A type of therapy that uses hypnosis (a calm and relaxing state) to address some mental health issues and change certain behaviours or habits.  

• Integrative Therapy: The therapist is trained in and uses a range of modalities or techniques specifically for the client/patient and their presenting issues and what they wish to achieve from therapy.

• Internal Family Systems (IFS): This is an evidence-based type of psychotherapy which views every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts which are led by a core Self. Practitioners believe that the mind is naturally multiple and that inner parts are forced from their valuable states into extreme roles within us. By accessing and healing their protective and wounded inner parts, clients move towards understanding themselves on a deeper level and healing. www.Ifs-institute.com   

• Interpersonal Therapy: A short-term therapy that looks at how relationships around a client/patient affect their mental health. By working on these relationships and current issues this improves the symptoms of poor mental health. This therapy does not look at any past or childhood experiences. 

• Jungian Therapy: Developed by psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung, this therapy works on the premise that the personality is made up of multiple parts, both conscious and unconscious and by bringing these parts into awareness, a person can better understand themselves and alleviate mental health conditions. This is classed as a psychoanalytical approach (see below).

• Lifespan Integration (LI): A gentle body-mind therapy that works on a deep level to change unhelpful emotional responses and defensive strategies that exist as protection from the effect of past traumas. Many talking therapies work to change thinking, to change self-defeating behaviour and to heal old hurts. LI works with the body-mind system and change comes about due to the neural change occurring in the brain and body. Self-awareness comes from the transformation that has occurred rather than needing to be self-aware to transform. It can also make up for what was missing in childhood, changing attachment styles which developed in response to the childhood environment back then. In the presence of a coherent, attuned therapist, reparenting can take place at a bodily level, as a sense of worth, safety and security is woven into the timeline of memory cues. (Partly taken from https://lifespanintegration.com/uk/about-lifespan-integration/)

• Mindfulness: This practice is about being in the present moment. By stopping and becoming aware of the world around us, we can be fully present in our surroundings, notice without judgement and accept what is. This improves wellbeing and there are many ways in which a person can learn to be mindful.  

• Music Therapy: The creative use of music and instruments as a therapeutic intervention, delivered by a trained Music Therapist. In the UK music therapy is governed by BAMT and HCPC. (Partially taken from the BAMT website)

• Neuro-Linguistic Therapy (NLP): NLP challenges negative thinking, emotions and behaviour by looking at the use of language and communication. Challenging outdated and self-limiting beliefs which improves confidence as well as mental, emotional and phsyical wellbeing. 

• Parks Inner Child Therapy: This is a powerful and versatile visualisation-based therapy model. An evolving, cognitive form of therapy, with a foundation in basic Transactional Analysis, that incorporates Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) to aid rapid positive change. PICT therapists also have the skills to assist with Critical Incident Debriefing (witnessing/experiencing highly traumatic events). (Taken from https://www.ppfoundation.org/pict.aspx)

• Person-Centred Therapy: Developed by Carl Rogers, this humanistic talking therapy uses the safe and trusting relationship between the therapist and client to bring about change. The therapist is empathic, non-judgemental, honest and offers unconditional positive regard to the client. They believe in the uniqueness of the individual, understand their world as they see it and trust in this process to allow the client to explore their difficulties, heal and grow towards their full potential. This is a non-directive, client-led therapy. 

• Phenomenological Therapy: This has very close links to the development of the Person-Centred Approach with the addition of the philosophy that the individual’s experience in the world is their reality. The therapist works to understand and ‘feel’ this reality so the client will feel validated and can move forward to achieve their potential.   

• Play Therapy: Generally used to help children between the ages of 3 to 14, Play Therapy can be used for adults too. Children don’t always understand what has happened to them or what they are feeling or have the language to say what is going on for them. By using different materials, toys or playing games children can express these things in different ways with the therapist working alongside them.

• Positive Psychotherapy: A relatively new approach, this model looks at a person’s strengths and abilities to achieve better mental health instead of just trying to change negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. 

• Psychoanalysis: Developed by Sigmund Freud, he believed that difficulties in adulthood were due to experiences during development that remain unresolved in the unconscious. If the unconscious were brought into a person’s awareness such as repressed fears, memories, desires, and emotions then the client/patient could then work them through to gain insight. The therapist/practitioner will also use dream analysis and transference of feelings and behaviours from the client/patient towards the therapist/practitioner to highlight unconscious issues.  

• Psychodrama: A holistic style of therapy where a person can work through their issues by acting and role-playing, either individually or with a group who will take on roles of people around them. The group members are free to use their imagination and express emotions that can give a different perspective on the issues.  

• Psychodynamic Therapy: This modality originates from Freud’s theories and psychoanalysis but expands on it, looking at the unconscious, the personality and the mind as well as the effects of the world on the problems being experienced. 

• Psychosexual Therapy: Also known as sex therapy, is a couple and individual therapy treatment that addresses sexual difficulties, some are unique to males, some to females and one or two that appear to have no bias whatsoever. Using a combination of cognitive behavioural therapy and relationship counselling, psychosexual therapy can be very effective in resolving sexual problems. Clients are encouraged to set their own goals, based on what they wish to achieve. When the problem involves a current relationship, it can often be helpful if both of you participate in the therapy. It may be necessary to work with you and your GP or another specialist for medical advice. Psychosexual therapists do not perform any physical examination on their clients.

• Psychosynthesis: Another modality that originates from Psychoanalysis that works on the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual parts of a person to bring them together as one. This enables the client/patient to say what they need and be more fulfilled.  

• Relationship Therapy: This doesn’t just apply to couples but can help with any relationships such as family and work colleagues. It is a talking therapy where both parties can talk through their thoughts and feelings regarding the relationship, listen to each other and learn about their triggers contributing to the issues between them. This way all parties gain new insight into the problems, learn new ways to manage their process, communicate better and resolve the tensions to be able to move forward together.

• Schema Therapy: Schemas is the term used for negative self-beliefs or patterns of behaviour that have become deeply entrenched from childhood. These thoughts progress into adulthood and prevent the person from achieving their life goals. The therapy aims to work on these schemas and replace them with healthier, more positive ones.

• Solution Focused Therapy (SFT): This is a short-term therapy that is used to focus on a person’s goals and work on achieving them. It does not look at the past, just at the present and future and what the person can do.

• Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy: This is a type of talking therapy that combines the use of psychotherapy with hypnosis. Hypnosis or ‘trance’ is a very natural, relaxing state, encouraged by using guided relaxation, where the mind can relax and then focus on thoughts and suggestions that might be useful.  As a modern psychotherapeutic approach, this uses practical, structured, and well-researched strategies to help people make significant, positive changes in their lives in a relatively short period. Crucially the therapists focus on what the client wants to achieve (the solution) rather than on whatever prompted them to seek help.

• Somatic Experiencing Therapy: Developed by psychotherapist Dr Peter A. Levine, this modality is a body-based therapy to work with trauma and trauma-related conditions. It works on the premise that trauma can be trapped in the body and so to heal this needs to be safely released. The therapist/practitioner focuses the client/patient on their bodily sensations and emotions and gently allows the trauma to be released, healing and restoring the body. 

• Systemic Therapy: This may also be called family therapy but can be used with groups. It allows the members of the family to voice any difficulties or emotions to understand and appreciate each other's issues and supporting each other through them to make changes.

• Transactional Analysis (TA): Practitioners of TA work with the theory that the personality is made up of three parts, the parent, the adult, and the child, all established in childhood. These parts interact but this plays out in the person’s behaviours and relationships. By recognising and understanding these interactions, behaviours and relationships can be improved.

• Transforming the Experienced-Based Brain (TEB): This is a "Trauma-Informed" modality.  The modality is based on the idea that when there are ruptures during early platform development, they continue to disrupt a person's life.  TEB incorporates presence, regulation, and a trusting relationship between the therapist and client to repair these ruptures. This method reflects the understanding of Developmental Trauma and relies on studies such as the Adverse Childhood Experience Study. 

https://www.austinattach.com/transforming-the-experience-based-brain/)

• Transpersonal Therapy: By understanding the self and our spirituality, this holistic therapy works on the physical, mental, emotional, intellectual, and social needs of the person to promote growth. 

• Yoga Psychotherapy: This is a holistic, bio-psycho-social-spiritual therapy focused on whole person wellbeing; physical, energetic, mental, emotional, and spiritual. It includes psychotherapeutic and body-based approaches, including talk therapy, sensorimotor, movement, breathwork, energy-balancing, mindfulness, meditation, acceptance, and compassion therapy as well as a wide range of complementary concepts and techniques drawn from some of the most efficacious and relevant psychotherapeutic modalities. These models are all viewed using a yogic framework.

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