ProTherapy | Psychotherapy and Occupational Health in Chester, North Wales and the North West

Individuals

Psychotherapy helps clients to identify feelings and ways of thinking that enable them to gain understanding and insight into their difficulties. Our approach is an interpersonal, relational process to aid you in your problems of living.

Sessional work may be on an individual basis, or together with your spouse or partner, if you are experiencing relational difficulties.

The United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) define psychotherapy as:

"Psychotherapy is the provision by qualified practitioners of a formal and professional relationship within which patients/clients can profitably explore difficult, and often painful, emotions and experiences. These may include feelings of anxiety, depression, trauma, or perhaps the loss of meaning of ones life. It is a process which seeks to help the person gain an increased capacity for choice, through which the individual becomes more autonomous and self determined."

Examples of ProTherapy working with individuals include:

• Increasing personal awareness to instigate change
• Unlocking psychological resources and abilities
• Enhancing problem solving skills to restore a level of confidence and self-esteem

The agreed sessions are normally for 50 minutes duration and take place on a weekly or fortnightly basis.

At ProTherapy we offer a range of therapeutic approaches, which include solution focused, cognitive behavioural, interpersonal and EMDR.

Solution Focused brief therapy is an approach to psychotherapy that is brief and effective. Research shows it to bring about lasting change on average in less than 5 sessions and in up to 83% of referrals. It can be brief because it is future-focused and because it works with the strengths of the individual making the best use of their resources. It can bring about lasting change precisely because it aims to build solutions rather than solve problems.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a psychological approach which is based on scientific principles and which research has shown to be effective for a wide range of problems. Client and therapist work together to identify and understand problems in terms of their relationship between thoughts, feelings and behaviour. The approach usually focuses on difficulties in the here and now, and relies on the therapist and client developing a shared view of the individual's problem. This then leads to the identification of goals and strategies designed to overcome the problem.

Interpersonal Psychotherapy is a brief and highly structured approach that addresses interpersonal issues in depression. It is modest in its use of psychotherapy jargon and promotes attention to the relationship based issues which are central to the experience of many depressed individuals. It attends to difficulties arising in the daily experience of maintaining relationships and resolving difficulties while suffering an episode of major depression. The fundamental clinical task of interpersonal therapy is to help individuals to learn to link mood with interpersonal contacts, and to recognise that by appropriately addressing interpersonal situations they may simultaneously improve both their relationships and depressive state.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing. It is an evidence based therapeutic procedure and has been mainly used in the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress. However, it now being increasingly used to treat e.g. grief, phobias, anxiety and panic disorders. It is believed that the eye movements induced in EMDR mirror the natural eye movement process that occurs in REM (rapid eye movement) phase of sleep during which information is processed naturally.

We can offer help with: