What Is Humanistic Therapy? Humanistic therapy is a broad category of psychotherapy approaches, including person-centered therapy and Gestalt therapy, that emphasize personal growth, self-actualization, free will, and the inherent worth and dignity of the individual, generally prioritizing the therapeutic relationship and present-moment experience over structured techniques. How It Works Humanistic approaches share the view that …
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Adlerian Therapy
What Is Adlerian Therapy? Adlerian therapy, based on Alfred Adler’s individual psychology, is a therapeutic approach that emphasizes social connectedness, purposeful behavior, and how early childhood experiences and birth order shape a person’s outlook and life goals, aiming to foster a greater sense of belonging and constructive engagement with life. How It Works This approach …
Emotion-Focused Therapy
What Is Emotion-Focused Therapy? Emotion-focused therapy is an experiential psychotherapy that helps people identify, fully experience, and work through emotions, based on the understanding that avoiding or suppressing emotions can contribute to psychological difficulties, while accessing and processing them can support healing. How It Works This approach is grounded in the idea that emotions carry …
Existential Therapy
What Is Existential Therapy? Existential therapy is a philosophically informed psychotherapy that explores fundamental human concerns, such as meaning, freedom, choice, isolation, and mortality, as they relate to a person’s psychological distress, rather than focusing primarily on symptom reduction techniques. How It Works This approach is based on the premise that psychological distress can arise …
Narrative Therapy
What Is Narrative Therapy? Narrative therapy is a therapeutic approach based on the idea that people make sense of their lives through stories, and that psychological difficulties can be understood as problem-saturated narratives. Therapy helps people externalize problems (viewing the problem as separate from their identity) and construct alternative, more empowering stories about their lives. …
Gestalt Therapy
What Is Gestalt Therapy? Gestalt therapy is an experiential, humanistic psychotherapy that emphasizes present-moment awareness (often summarized as focusing on the “here and now”) and direct experience of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, rather than primarily analyzing past events or abstract interpretation. How It Works Gestalt therapy is grounded in the idea that psychological wholeness …
Person-Centered Therapy
What Is Person-Centered Therapy? Person-centered therapy, also known as client-centered therapy, is a humanistic psychotherapy that emphasizes the therapist providing empathy, unconditional positive regard, and genuineness, based on the belief that people have an inherent capacity for growth and self-understanding given a supportive environment. How It Works This approach is based on the idea that …