Grey Matter Therapy Services

In CBT, clients learn to identify, question and change the thoughts, attitudes and beliefs related to the emotional and behavioural reactions that cause them difficulty.

By monitoring and recording thoughts during upsetting situations, people learn that how they think can contribute to emotional problems such as depression and anxiety. CBT helps to reduce these emotional problems by teaching clients to identify distortions in their thinking, see thoughts as ideas about what is going on rather than as facts, and stand back from their thinking to consider situations from different viewpoints.

CBT is structured, time-limited (usually 6-20 sessions), problem-focused and goal-oriented, teaches strategies and skills, & is based on a proactive, shared therapeutic relationship between psychologist and client.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a unique empirically based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility means contacting the present moment fully as a conscious human being, and based on what the situation affords, changing or persisting in behavior in the service of chosen values.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is an extensively researched, effective psychotherapy method proven to help people recover from trauma and other distressing life experiences, including PTSD, anxiety, depression, and panic disorders.

Stress responses are part of our natural fight, flight, or freeze instincts. When distress from a disturbing event remains, the upsetting images, thoughts, and emotions may create feelings of overwhelm, of being back in that moment, or of being “frozen in time.” EMDR therapy helps the brain process these memories, and allows normal healing to resume. The experience is still remembered, but the fight, flight, or freeze response from the original event is resolved.

Solution Focused Therapy is a short-term goal-focused evidence-based therapeutic approach which helps clients change by constructing solutions rather than dwelling on problems. In the most basic sense, SFT is a hope friendly, positive emotion eliciting, future-oriented vehicle for formulating, motivating, achieving, and sustaining desired behavioral change.

Solution-Focused practitioners develop solutions by first generating a detailed description of how the client’s life will be different when the problem is gone or their situation improved to a degree satisfactory to the client. Therapist and client then carefully search through the client’s life experience and behavioral repertoire to discover the necessary resources needed to co-construct a practical and sustainable solution that the client can readily implement. Typically this process involves identifying and exploring previous “exceptions,” e.g. times when the client has successfully coped with or addressed previous difficulties and challenges. In an inherently respectful and practical interview process, SF therapists and their clients consistently collaborate in identifying goals reflective of clients’ best hopes and developing satisfying solutions.

Narrative therapy seeks to be a respectful, non-blaming approach to counselling and community work, which centres people as the experts in their own lives. It views problems as separate from people and assumes people have many skills, competencies, beliefs, values, commitments and abilities that will assist them to reduce the influence of problems in their lives.

A means of evaluating and developing solutions for mental health concerns which moves focus away from problems with the individual and instead challenges them to be aware of how their actions and reactions are part of a broader system acting on and influencing the individual, who in turn influences other parts of the system.