The terms psychotherapy and counseling are very similar. For adult therapy and family therapy, both terms refer to an emotionally focused therapy where verbal discussion and exploration between therapist and patient is the main activity and cause of change. The goal is symptom relief through insight gained through the therapy as well as emotional support and guidance offered by the therapist.

In therapy for children, the psychotherapy takes an additional form, called Play Therapy, where the use of toys and creation of stories and symbolic themes supplements the use of verbal discussion about the problem at hand.

A good fit with your therapist, or genuinely liking this person and trusting in their capacities, has been shown to be more important to the outcome or effectiveness of the therapy, than the specific type of therapy that they practice. Good.people are hard to find.

The psychoanalytic orientation views the reasons for behaviour as very complex and multiply determined. There are deep-seated reasons for why we do things that are often quite resistant to change through conventional means. We can not change just because we want to, or just because we can see that our behaviour is self- defeating or damaging to others. Understanding the problem intellectually is not enough. If it was, we could change our behaviour by reading self-help books, which rarely works.

The psychoanalytic tradition seeks to develop collaborative understanding with the patient through the therapist’s empathic, listening stance and capacity to be with the patient in their suffering. To be compassionate is to suffer with someone. A therapeutic relationship develops that the patients finds to be unconditionally supportive and useful in a way they have not experienced before. The patient’s difficulties are often brought into the room and understood in this new context. The psychoanalytic therapist makes interpretions, or evidence-based, educated guesses about what the patient presents, and understanding progresses through the collaborative negotiation of these ideas.