What is psychotherapy? You may be unfamiliar with the term. But chances are you’ve seen it before. You’ve undoubtedly watched images of a person in a chair on a couch talking through their challenges, feelings, and memories in a movie or show.
Psychotherapy is just a fancy word for “talk therapy.” “Psycho” sometimes has a negative connotation. But it just means “having to do with the mind.” So psychotherapy is a set of therapies that involve talking through what’s on your mind.
It comes in many forms and can be very helpful when learning to manage your addiction.
Types of Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy takes various approaches to support self-exploration and healing. Some of the most common forms of psychotherapy include:
- Cognitive-behavioral therapy: You’ll identify habits and thought patterns that don’t serve you. Then you reprogram yourself with more constructive thoughts and habits.
- Interpersonal psychotherapy: Examines how mental health issues can be triggered by events involving relationships with others, such as bereavements, disputes, or relocation. It helps you cope with the feelings involved, as well as work out coping strategies.
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprogramming): You identify traumas that are impacting your life and use a combination of talking, eye movements, tapping, and tones to eliminate the power that the trauma has over your actions and feelings so that it can heal.
- Equine therapy: Caring for horses or doing activities with them can be a part of an individual’s treatment plan. Horses are generally viewed as therapeutic, and working with them creates a healing bond between the patient and the horse.
- Dialectical behavior therapy: You’ll learn the skill of being more present-focused, listening to what your emotions are telling you, and understand how emotions can guide you to make productive changes now to improve your relationship with yourself and others.
- Motivational interviewing therapy: You’ll explore any mental blocks or hindrances that are holding you back from meaningful recovery and explore why you want to be healthy.
What Is Psychotherapy? The Benefits
There are numerous benefits to engaging in psychotherapy to address either your mental health issues or substance abuse issues. Quite often, people bottle up emotions and don’t share with others how they feel. This can cause you to feel disconnected from those around you and out-of-touch with your own emotions. As a result, despair, mental health challenges, and addiction may set in.
When you talk through thoughts and feelings, it brings to the surface those hidden layers, memories, traumas, or beliefs that may impact you when you don’t even realize it. Talk therapy lets you be the guide in your recovery. Because ultimately, the answers are within you. The realizations you’ll have are more powerful than having someone tell you what you should or shouldn’t do.
Professionals use the various types of psychotherapy to coax these realizations out of you. That way, you can start creating a recovery plan that will work for you. It’s an individualized approach to treatment that puts you in the driver’s seat of your healing process.
How Integrative Life Center Uses Psychotherapy to Treat Addiction
The Integrative Life Center in Nashville uses a variety of psychotherapies and other holistic approaches like nutrition therapy and music therapy. Through our mind-body-spirit integrative approach, you’ll learn more about who you are and what factors contribute to your addiction.
You’ll then develop proven skills to manage addiction, mental health challenges, emotions, and life in general.
Are you ready to start a new, healthier life in recovery? Talking about it with a professional can help. So take that first step, and please call us at [Direct] to speak with someone about treatment.
