Suffering from feelings appears in a broad spectrum of intensity, from mild to severe. When distress is extreme, medication use can help make the situation safe, yet it is psychotherapy that is the standard treatment approach. No two patients are the same, and no two therapies are the same. Two major types of psychotherapy benefit different types of problems. These overlap in some essential therapeutic aspects, such as the use of empathy. They differ significantly in other aspects, such as the degree to which empathy is used in the treatment process. Understanding the personal origins of emotional pain is often critical to feeling better.
These psychotherapies are based on theories of normal and abnormal development in early and sensitive periods of a person's life. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy explores the connection between childhood and adulthood, history of interpersonal relationships, character structure, and psychological symptoms with ever-active forces inside the mind, conscious or unconscious. Psychoanalysis is an intensive, dynamic form of psychotherapy. It requires more frequent sessions, on average three to five per week. Transference Focused therapy is an intensive subtype of psychanalytic therapy. It is designed to specifically help patients challenged by Narcissistic Personality Disorders and is conducted twice a week.
During treatment, important attention is given to the effects of early childhood neglect, abuse, emotional injury, and trauma. One crucial and significant notion is that emotional suffering in adulthood results from unresolved or poorly solved intrapsychic conflicts. Unmet basic emotional needs are believed to be the origins of those conflicts. The correlatives of these needs have been also localized by neuroscience to certain physical brain activities. Central to this is the difficulty to negotiate a balance between what one wants to do, needs to do, and what makes most sense to do.
The emotionally painful conflicts and compromises one has built over time to keep the conflicts out of consciousness are repeatedly interpreted with the help of the therapist. Patients achieve gradual emotional and cognitive awareness of why specific patterns of thinking, feeling, and relating cause problematic feelings. By reappraising the past, the patient eventually habitually changes the acts in the present. New learning shifts the future in a healthier direction.
Some of the primary goals are building healthy self-esteem and a cohesive self with lasting quality. Neuropsychoanalysis, a therapy modality that emerged in the mid-1980s, returned the focus to the brain as the organ of the mind. It aims to integrate neuroscience with psychological treatments to make them more precise.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) was proven as helpful through rigorous scientific trials. It uses the premise that how a person perceives a situation is more closely connected to their maladaptive automatic thoughts and emotional reaction than the situation itself. This type of psychotherapy focuses on helping patients figure out what they want from life, teaches them new coping skills, and helps to reach set goals. Through manualized, structured exercises with the therapist and homework assignments, patients learn how to change their ways of thinking and behaving. This process leads to improved mood and a general sense of well-being. Recommendations to supplement therapy with relevant readings, to think over what you have learned in the previous sessions, and to write down what you want to be discussed in future sessions are commonly used. In its various adaptations, CBT can help with conditions such as general stress, anger problems, depression, and anxiety - particularly in persons with high-functioning autism conditions, substance abuse, obsessive-compulsive disorder, insomnia, social and specific phobias, smoking cessation, and others. The course is time-limited, usually a one-hour session weekly for ten to 20 weeks.