Our Services
We provide a range of services tailored to suit each individual need. We provide our services locally in Cumbria, but also online.
What can we help with?
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Phobias and avoidance
- Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
- Stress
- Post Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD)
- Complex Post Traumatic stress Disorder (CPTSD)
- Acute Stress
- Aversive life experiences and trauma reactions
- Bereavement
- Adjustment difficulties (e.g. to life changes, loss, physical health problems)
- Relationship difficulties
- Attachment issues
- Issues of adult personality / personality disorder
- Emotional regulation problems, e.g. anger and impulsivity
- Self-esteem
- Addictions
Our approach
Whichever approach we provide to suit your needs, we offer a safe, confidential and easily accessible service provided by highly experienced therapists to people from Cumbria, Northumbria, Dumfries and Galloway as well as more widely online.
Our highly experienced therapists can help you find the approach that’s right for you. Whether you need a single therapy style with a specialist such as psychoanalytic psychotherapy or CBT, or a blended approach, we can help you.
The range of therapies available is wide and below is a list of different types of therapy should you want to know more. We would also be delighted to hear from you and you can contact us to speak to someone who will help you make the right choice of therapist for you.
The choice of well-established approaches includes:
Humanistic Psychotherapy
Focus on self-development, growth and responsibilities. They help individuals recognise their strengths…read more
Transactional Analysis
Helps you explore your personality and how it has developed and to break damaging patterns of behaviour…read more
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
Helps patients understand and resolve their difficulties by increasing awareness of their inner world and its influence over relationships…read more
Person-centred Psychotherapy
A humanistic approach that deals with the ways in which individuals perceive themselves…read more
Body Psychotherapy
A versatile therapy that incorporates touch, breathing, and movement techniques to address a wide range of mental and physical health concerns…read more
Mindfulness & Acceptance Therapies
The practice of paying attention to the present moment and therapies which help us to accept the world around us.…read more
Integrative Psychotherapy
Integrative Therapy combines elements of different approaches to fit the needs of the individual client…read more
Psycho-sexual Therapy
The use of targeted counselling, or longer-term psychotherapy to help address sexual problems…read more
Systemic Family Therapy
Looks at problems as affecting the whole family or the wider system of people involved…read more
Couples & Relationship Therapy
Works with couples to improve communication and resolve issues within an intimate relationship…read more
Narrative Therapy (NT)
Seeks to help people identify their values and the skills they have that can help them…read more
Attachment Narrative Therapy (ANT)
ANT focuses on early experiences to draw out links with how we relate to others as adults…read more
Solution Focused Therapy (SFT)
In SFT the goals for therapy are chosen by the client and therapy draws out the resources the client has themselves to make changes…read more
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
CBT is a NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence – www.nice.org.uk) recommended treatment for a range of psychological problems. Whether you are struggling with low mood/ depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, low self-esteem, panic , obsessive compulsive disorder or excessive worry, CBT can help you to understand your difficulties, what keeps them going and to learn tools, techniques and strategies to overcome or manage these difficulties.
CBT is an active form of therapy with a central theory that how you think about an event, situation or a problem can affect how you feel physically and emotionally. It can also alter what you do about it. There are helpful and unhelpful ways of reacting to most situations, depending on how you think about them.
Whilst we cannot change the past, we can understand how it has informed and shaped the present. CBT helps you to understand how unhelpful patterns of thoughts (cognitions) and behaviours can affect how you feel and what you do. CBT can help with the process of unlearning unhelpful patterns of thinking by identifying negative thoughts, learning to check whether they are actually true/factual or whether they might just be assumptions or guesses that could be wrong. CBT helps the client to develop more helpful ways of thinking which in turn improves how they feel emotionally and then what they do in terms of their everyday activity and behaviour.
Therapists who can help with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
Humanistic Psychotherapy
The humanistic approaches are based on the belief that we all naturally gravitate towards health and self actualisation. While of course, difficult life experiences may temporarily block our ability to reach our potential, with the right support, we all have the ability to achieve our goals.
Approaches such as transactional analysis, narrative therapy, client-centred therapy and solution-focused therapy incorporate humanistic principles.
Therapists who can help with Humanistic Psychotherapy
Transactional Analysis (TA)
Transactional Analysis can help a person improve their self image, their communication skills and to change damaging repetitive patterns of behaviour, thus helping to build better relationships.
Therapists who can help with Transactional Analysis (TA)
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
It is a therapeutic process which helps patients understand and resolve their difficulties by increasing awareness of their inner world and its influence over relationships both past and present.
It’s aim is for deep seated change in personality and emotional functioning.
Therapists who can help with Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
Person-centred Psychotherapy
Client, or person centred therapy is commonly used to treat a number of issues which include relationship problems, depression, anxiety, bereavement, addictions, sexuality, anger and transitions in life.
Therapists who can help with Person-centred Psychotherapy
Body Psychotherapy
Drawing from several branches of science and psychology, this approach to treatment is a versatile therapy that incorporates touch, breathing, and movement techniques to address a wide range of mental and physical health concerns that may lead people to seek therapy.
Therapists who can help with Body Psychotherapy
Mindfulness & Acceptance Therapies
Mindfulness can be described as the practice of paying attention in the present moment, and doing it intentionally and with non-judgment. Mindfulness meditation practices refer to the deliberate acts of regulating attention through the observation of thoughts, emotions and body states.
Mindfulness can also be applied to activities and typical mindfulness activities include: mindful walking, yoga & mindful eating.
Acceptance based therapies such Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) use mindfulness and other techniques to focus on developing your personal values and achieving goals related to your core values.
Therapists who can help with Mindfulness & Acceptance Therapies
Integrative Psychotherapy
It refers to bringing together different parts and levels – the emotional, cognitive, behavioural and physiological systems – within a person, with an awareness of developmental states and the social and transpersonal aspects of the system surrounding the person. It addresses as well the spiritual dimensions of life.
The aim is to facilitate and maximise the quality of the person’s being and functioning in the intrapsychic, interpersonal and socio-political space.
There is a particular ethical obligation on integrative psychotherapists to dialogue with colleagues of diverse orientations and to remain informed of developments in the field.
Therapists who can help with Integrative Psychotherapy
Psycho-sexual Therapy
Psycho-sexual therapy is the use of targeted counselling, or longer-term psychotherapy to help address sexual problems. It is a talking-based therapy.
Having sexual difficulties can feel very isolating, you may feel self-conscious and unable to speak up about them, however sexual problems are very common and the best way to tackle them is to talk about it.
Psychosexual problems can be emotional and/or psychological but they can also be caused by or lead to physical problems. The aim of the therapy is to help improve intimacy and manage or overcome the difficulties you are having.
Therapists who can help with Psycho-sexual Therapy
Systemic Psychotherapy
Systemic Psychotherapy, also known as systemic family therapy, is a form of therapy that looks at problems as affecting the whole family or the wider system of people involved. Systemic therapy seeks to reduce distress and conflict within the family by addressing and improving the understanding and the systems of interactions between individuals. It can involve anyone in the family, whether parents and children, grandparents, siblings, partners, friends and carers.
As well as being useful to couples and families, systemic therapy can be helpful to individuals who want a better understanding of their own interactions and relationships.
Systemic therapy aims to identify deep-rooted patterns within individual relationships with family members. This approach helps to uncover communication and behaviour within the family system and in wider relationships that may be contributing to difficulties and in doing so it can resolve or help address emotional & psychological difficulties.
Therapists who can help with Systemic Psychotherapy
Relationship therapy
Relationship Therapy (also known as couples therapy) is an effective form of talking therapy. They are terms applied to talking therapy for two people within an intimate relationship.
Sessions take place in a safe space and look to improve communication and resolve issues within an intimate relationship. In contrast to Systemic Psychotherapy, which can be undertaken solely through individual sessions, couples counselling is a term applied to talking therapy for two people within an intimate relationship.
Therapists who can help with Relationship therapy
EMDR: Eye-movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing
EMDR is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that result from disturbing life experiences and trauma. This includes complex trauma such as childhood abuse, neglect or other situation where there are repeated experiences of distress as well as experiences like a car accident or incident at work.
The process also works for anxiety, panic, stress and phobias as well as complicated grief, addictions, low self-esteem and performance anxiety.
EMDR is a talking therapy which incorporates bilateral stimulations (eye movements, auditory or tactile stimulations) which help the brain to process information and reduce (desensitise) hypervigilance and the body’s physiological reaction to threat (the fight or flight response).
Therapists who can help with EMDR: Eye-movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing
Narrative Therapy (NT)
Narrative therapy is a form of psychotherapy that seeks to help people identify their values and the skills associated with them. It provides the client with the knowledge and the ability to live their life according to these values so they can effectively confront current and future problems.
NT seeks to hear and understand the distress a client has experienced, but it also sets out to challenge the “dominant discourses” that shape people’s lives in destructive ways. This is called “re-authoring identity” and it helps people identify exceptions to the problem story and build on those exceptions to identify values and to use skills and knowledge to live out these values in their lives.
Therapists who can help with Narrative Therapy
Attachment Narrative Therapy (ANT)
Attachment narratives can be an important element in working with childhood trauma or neglect or where there are current relationship difficulties that involve repeating patterns of behaviour.
Like other forms of systemic psychotherapy, rather than viewing problems as resulting from various forms of individual deficit or pathology it offers a view of problems as resulting from relationship processes and patterns.
Therapists who can help with Attachment Narrative Therapy (ANT)
Solution Focused Therapy (SFT)
The core assumptions of the solution-focused approach are that the goals for therapy are chosen by the clients and that the clients themselves have the resources they will use in making changes. These assumptions apply to individuals, couples and families.
While considered to be effective in helping clients bring about changes quickly, solution-focused therapy is also helpful with long-standing problems such as learning difficulties, developmental problems such as autism and severe mental health issues including personality disorders, eating problems and long-term depression.
Therapists who can help with Solution Focused Therapy (SFT)
Contact Us
Our main offices are in Carlisle at:
13 Earl Street
Carlisle
Cumbria
CA1 1DP
Email: enquiries@psychologycumbria.co.uk
We also have clinicians who see clients in Penrith, Wigton & Ivegill in Cumbria