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ACT was developed in the 1980s by psychologist Steven C. Hayes, a professor at the University of Nevada.. It’s an action-oriented approach to therapy that stems from traditional behaviour therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy. Clients learn to stop avoiding, denying, and struggling with their inner emotions and, instead, accept that these deeper feelings are appropriate responses to certain situations that should not prevent them from moving forward in their lives. With this understanding, clients begin to accept their hardships and commit to making necessary changes in their behaviour, regardless of what is going on in their lives and how they feel about it. ACT aims to develop and expand psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility encompasses emotional openness and the ability to adapt your thoughts and behaviours to better align with your values and goals. – Psychology Today ACT emerged from the CBT & amp; Mindfulness traditions and is another ‘evidence based’ treatment. Much of ACT’s focus is helping us to understand that the more we resist and try to eliminate negative thoughts, the more likely it is that these exact thoughts will be reinforced and stick around. Our goal is to learn to become diffused from thoughts and commit to value-driven actions. For more information, visit https://www.actmindfully.com.au

Through their research with thousands of couples at The Gottman Love Lab in Washington, Drs John & Julie Gottman have developed a comprehensive set if ideas, tools and skills for couples to help improve the quality of their interactions within their relationship. They’ve developed a great app (click here to download the app) which is a really fun, helpful and insightful way of strengthening your relationship. “The 7 principles for making marriage work” is also a bestseller. For more information, visit https://www.gottman.com The goals of the Gottman Method include increasing closeness and friendship behaviours, addressing conflict productively, and building a life of shared meaning together. The Gottman Method involves customizing principles to each couple’s particular patterns and challenges. The Seven Principles include the following concepts: 1. Build Love Maps: This refers to an ongoing awareness of our partners’ worlds as they move through time: how they think and feel, what day-to-day life is like for them, and their values, hopes, aspirations, and stresses. 2. Express Fondness and Admiration: Couples who function well are able to appreciate and enjoy most aspects of each partner’s behaviour and learn to live with differences. 3. Turn Toward One Another: Conversational patterns of interest and respect, even about mundane topics are crucial to happiness. Couples who turn toward successfully maintain a 20:1 ratio of expressing interest or acknowledgment vs. ignoring conversational gambits. This is referred to as the “Emotional Bank Account.” Couples who are highly successful keep a 5:1 ratio in conflict discussions, even Turning Towards while arguing. 4. Accept Influence: Members of a couple who take the other partner’s preferences into account and are willing to compromise and adapt are happiest. Being able to yield and maintain mutual influence, while avoiding power struggles, helps couples keep a balance of power that feels reasonable and builds trust. 5. Solve Problems That Are Solvable: Couples who can find compromise on issues are using five tactics. They soften start up so the beginning of the conversation leads to a satisfactory end. They offer and respond to repair attempts, or behaviours that maintain the emotional connection and emphasize “we/us” over individual needs. They effectively soothe themselves and their partner. They use compromise and negotiation skills. They are tolerant of one another’s vulnerabilities and ineffective conversational habits, keeping the focus on shared concern for the well-being of the relationship. 6. Manage Conflict and Overcome Gridlock: The Gottman Method helps couples manage, not resolve, conflict. Conflict is viewed as inherent in relationship and doesn’t go away. Happy couples report the majority of their conflicts, 69% are perpetual in nature, meaning they are present throughout the course of time and are dealt with only as needed. These recurrent themes become part of the couple’s shared landscape and are kept in perspective, not dwelt upon. 7. Create Shared Meaning: Connection in relationship occurs as each person experiences the multitude of ways in which their partner enriches their life with a shared history and helps them find meaning and make sense of struggles. - Written by Ellie Lisitsa, a former staff writer at The Gottman Institute and editor for The Gottman Relationship Blog.

The founder of CBT is the late Dr Aaron Beck and is primarily present-focussed and is considered an ‘evidence-based’ treatment. It is a form of therapy that is roughly based on the philosophy that many of our problems in daily living come from how we think about our problems. By actively identifying and challenging our basic thoughts, perceptions and assumptions about the situations that seem to be causing us distress, CBT helps us to build more helpful thinking styles and therefore, create behaviour change. Homework and therapy assignments are a regular part of CBT. For more information, visit https://www.cbtaustralia.com.au CBT is a treatment approach that provides us with a way of understanding our experience of the world, enabling us to make changes if we need to. It does this by dividing our experience into four central components: thoughts (cognitions), feelings (emotions), behaviours and physiology (your biology). – Cambridge.org CBT is goal-oriented and problem focused. CBT initially emphasizes the present. CBT is educative; it aims to teach the client to be his/her own therapist, and emphasizes relapse prevention. CBT aims to be time limited. -Brownbackmason.com

Developed by Dr Harville Hendrix & Helen LaKelly Hunt, Imago therapy is a form of couples counselling. It helps couples understand their conflicts in their relationships through a new lens – “conflict is growth trying to happen”. By using structured dialogues, the Imago couples therapist helps a couple to begin shifting out of the Power struggle phase and into having a more conscious connection and partnership. Their book “Getting the love you want” is a best seller and provides a great overview of the ideas and skills in Imago. For more information, visit http://www.imagocounselling.org.au According to Imago Relationship Therapy, our early childhood experiences impact on our adult relationships. The way we were treated as children by our caregivers will become issues in our intimate relationships. If, for example, you were criticised by your father, then you will be sensitive to criticism by your partner. You can find yourself being triggered to such an extent that you cannot see the good things in the relationship. Imago Relationship Therapy can help you to heal and understand your childhood wounds. Through counselling or attending one of the couples’ workshops, you can learn communication skills and the Imago Dialogue. This transformative process can lead to deep and intimate connections with your partner and save or enhance your relationships. Imago is renowned for its dialogue technique. It focuses on building trust in relationship by teaching powerful, effective, common-sense communication skills which can quickly create a feeling of safety. Even after just a few sessions, many couples immediately experience an opportunity to connect more deeply with their partners, helping to appreciate them more and reviving hope in their relationship. -From the Association of Imago Relationship Therapy Australia website: www.imagocounselling.org.au

DBT was developed by Dr Marsha Linehan specifically to help those of us who really struggle with emotional regulation difficulties and impulsive behaviours. Another ‘evidence based’ therapy, DBT seeks to help us embrace the ‘dialectic’ – being mindful of opposites and balancing our Emotional Mind & amp; Rational Mind. Using a very comprehensive set of skills, DBT helps us ‘build up a life worth living’ by embracing our Wise Mind. For further information, visit https://dbtinstitute.com.au The term "dialectical" comes from the idea that bringing together two opposites in therapy -- acceptance and change -- brings better results than either one alone. A unique aspect of DBT is its focus on acceptance of a patient's experience as a way for therapists to reassure them and balance the work needed to change negative behaviours. Standard comprehensive DBT has four parts: - Individual therapy - Group skills training - Phone coaching, if needed for crises between sessions - Consultation group for health care providers to stay motivated and discuss patient care How Does DBT Work? Comprehensive DBT focuses on four ways to enhance life skills: ~ Distress tolerance: Feeling intense emotions like anger without reacting impulsively or using self-injury or substance abuse to dampen distress. ~ Emotion regulation: Recognizing, labeling, and adjusting emotions. ~ Mindfulness: Becoming more aware of self and others and attentive to the present moment. ~ Interpersonal effectiveness: Navigating conflict and interacting assertively. What Conditions Does DBT Treat? Dialectical behavioural therapy can focus on clients with multiple diagnoses, acute emotional distress, intense bursts of anger / aggression, moods that shift rapidly, and extreme sensitivity to rejection. DBT was initially designed to treat people with suicidal behaviour and borderline personality disorder. But it has been adapted for other mental health problems that threaten a person's safety, relationships, work, and emotional well-being. – WebMD / Dialectical Behavioural Therapy for mental health problems, webmd.com

The most classical form of therapy, with numerous founders like Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Nancy McWilliams. Psychodynamic therapy’s understanding of the internal conscious and unconscious world of the client has been instrumental in laying the foundations for subsequent psychotherapies. The client’s ‘presenting problem’ is seen to be the symptom of an internal conflict with which the client is wrestling. By helping clients achieve insight, psychodynamic therapists help their clients to make more conscious decisions to build a more integrated life. For more information, visit https://www.anzap.com.au The goal of this therapy is often to change an aspect of one's identity or personality or to integrate key developmental learning missed while the client was stuck at an earlier stage of emotional development. – National Library of Medicine Psychodynamic psychotherapy is indicated when a patient's problems are linked to unconscious factors that lead to interpersonal difficulties, maladaptive ways of coping with stress, and/or distorted self-perceptions. Generally speaking, individuals with depression, anxiety, certain personality disorders, or trauma may be suitable for psychodynamic therapy. There are several theories as to why psychodynamic therapy is efficacious as a treatment modality, including: Making the unconscious conscious that unconscious thoughts and feelings affect and motivate people and becoming aware of these thoughts is therapeutic. It allows the patient to better know themselves, and releasing these unconscious ideas can be cathartic Supporting weakened ego function psychodynamic therapy helps patient by supporting their ego function Reactivating mental and emotional development psychodynamic therapy can reactivate a patient's mental and emotional development, which leads to new and healthier growth. Examples include developing new ways of thinking about themselves, relating to others, and developing more adaptable and flexible coping skills/mechanisms - PsychDB Psychodynamic therapy is primarily used to treat depression and other serious psychological disorders, especially in those who have lost meaning in their lives and have difficulty forming or maintaining personal relationships. – Psychology Today

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a therapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. EMDR is a trauma-focussed form of therapy developed by Dr Francine Shapiro. It is the gold-standard, 1 st choice, evidence based treatment, as recommended by the World Health Organisation. EMDR treats clients in the aftermath of a trauma to reduce trauma symptoms and reprocess the trauma so that the client can move forward and leave the trauma in the past. EMDR uses ‘bilateral stimulation’ to achieve this reprocessing. For more information, visit https://emdraa.org The Therapist will use different stimuli during session as part of the therapy process. Therapist directed lateral eye movements are the most commonly used external stimulus but a variety of other stimuli including hand-tapping and audio stimulation are often used (Shapiro, 1991). Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference. It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. EMDR therapy shows that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. There has been so much research on EMDR therapy that it is now recognized as an effective form of treatment for trauma and other disturbing experiences by organizations such as the World Health Organization. Given the worldwide recognition… millions of people have been treated successfully for over 25 years– EMDR Institute /emdr.com