Individual Psychotherapy in Austin.

The goal of psychotherapy (which is also known as talking therapy, talk therapy, and individual therapy) is to get you to feel better. We want to help you to recover from what has been troubling you. Psychotherapists use the terms response, remission, and recovery. These refer to you responding to treatment and feeling better.

For most people, that means feeling stronger mentally. It also means feeling more in control and closer to achieving personal happiness and contentment. The overall aim of psychotherapy is to help people manage their mental illnesses. It should improve their overall wellness emotionally and psychologically.

There are a lot of different ways to achieve these goals. So, the focus is not on one methodology, but on finding solutions that work for an individual client. We work closely with each client and apply our post-doctoral level knowledge and experience. Our therapists encourage the response, remission, and recovery process in their patients.

Psychotherapy can help treat a wide range of emotional, mental, physical, and behavioral disorders including, but not limited to:

• Personality disorders

• Depression

• Anxiety

• Post-traumatic stress disorder

• Addiction

• Eating disorders

Individual therapy addresses everyday issues by allowing you to dedicate time to explore your thoughts and feelings. Therapy gives you the space to focus solely on yourself and gain a deeper understanding of the issues affecting your everyday interactions. A skilled therapist can work with you to develop coping strategies to deal with conflicts and difficult situations.

The benefit of going to therapy will be different for each individual and the goals that they have set with their therapist. However, some common benefits of attending therapy include:

• Improving your quality of life

• Building better communication skills

• Feeling more empowered

• Gaining insights into your behavior

• Managing stress

• Addressing symptoms of mental health disorders

In the initial session of psychotherapy, the mental health professional will try to gather as much information about the patient’s mental health history as possible, as well as physical and emotional health. The therapist will guide the conversation while simultaneously allowing the patient to talk as much as possible. Psychotherapy sessions can incite intense emotional feelings, so it is perfectly normal for the patient to become angry, sad, upset, or even tearful during the course of a single session.

After this first session, a patient may decide whether or not the therapist’s style is the best for their mental health needs. Should they choose to proceed, each subsequent psychotherapy session can take anywhere from 45 to 60 minutes. The mental health professional may also assign homework that helps the patient, in their free time, build on topics discussed during the session.

A person undergoing psychotherapy can certainly expect confidentiality, though this may be breached if the patient admits to thoughts of harming themselves or others.

When undergoing psychotherapy, treatment can come in many different forms. Mental health professionals will make an assessment and decide the best approach to take.

The four most common psychotherapy approaches are:

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT): By helping people with mental illness see the connection between emotions, thoughts, and behavior, CBT has become one of the more popular and effective psychotherapy treatments to date. The mental health professional assists in helping the patient identify potentially inaccurate notions they may have about themselves and the world. By doing this, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can reduce a patient’s negative and harmful thoughts with healthy ones, helping them become more productive and functional in their daily life.

• Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT): This is a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy that can involve both individual and group therapy. DBT is typically used to treat high-risk patients with suicidal ideation and those with certain personality disorders. But it can also help those with mental illness develop new skills to help improve relationships, reduce stress, and regulate emotional well-being.

• Psychodynamic therapy: This form of therapy treats a patient’s mental well-being by addressing unresolved negative childhood events that are often hidden from the patient’s immediate awareness. The goal is to better understand the patient’s unconscious feelings regarding these experiences in order to help them break old habits and take back control of their life.

• Interpersonal psychotherapy: Typically a short-form treatment, interpersonal psychotherapy helps those with depression caused by unresolved grief, loss, relationship conflicts, social isolation, and role transitions (for example, becoming a parent or caregiver for the first time). The objective of interpersonal psychotherapy is to teach patients healthy ways to improve communication skills, express emotion, and increase self-esteem.

How effective is psychotherapy? Research findings show that up to 75 percent of people who undergo psychotherapy treatment receive some benefit over time. This research includes comparing the results of brain imaging procedures undergone both before and after treatment. The effectiveness rate has been cited as being identical to, if not better, than if a patient had taken medication.

Finding the right mental health professional is as paramount to the treatment process as a patient’s effort, participation, and openness.