What is Talk Therapy?

Sometimes, the best way to deal with an issue is to talk it through. And often, it’s better to talk it through with a stranger rather than someone you know.

Talk-based therapy is a great way to get things off your chest—however serious they might be. A trained counsellor uses talk therapy to listen to you, rather than leading the conversation. You can talk, shout, cry, or even just use the time to consider ways to help yourself.

How can talking therapy help?

There are plenty of benefits of talking to someone about your issues. Talking treatment is helpful for lots of things, including:

• Depression
• Anxiety
• Eating disorders
• Phobias
• Addiction
• Traumatic life events
• Serious illness

They can even help with other problems you might not expect. Infertility, grief, the shock of being diagnosed with a terminal illness, even redundancy—if it’s having a serious effect on your mental health, and you think that talking about it would help, it’s worth a try.

You don’t even need a referral from your GP. If you’re after talking therapies, self-referral is easy—you can find local services and contact them here.

So, how does talking therapy work?

Put simply, speaking out loud about the things that affect you can mean thinking about them in new and unexpected ways. And when you suddenly find a new perspective on a problem, that perspective can often lead to a solution—or at least show you the path toward one.

There are many, many different talk therapy techniques—they all have different focuses, ways of seeing the world, and methods of encouraging you to explore issues in your own way. Some talking therapy examples:

• Cognitive: known as CBT, this therapy explores your thoughts, the way that you think, and finds methods of influencing that for the better.
• Mindfulness: this involves slowing down and becoming aware of current feelings, accepting them, and using exercises like meditation to deal with the way they affect you.
• Person-centred: this concentrates on you and finds good things about yourself to concentrate on.
• Solution-focused: this is based around defining the things you want to achieve, and concentrating on the ways to get there—it’s about the future, not the past.

This is just a few of the talking therapies you’ll find offered by local services—there are countless others, like art therapy, behavioural and dialectic methods, and more. Contact a therapist and ask them for information on the services they’re good at, and how they can benefit you.

Always remember that you’re in control of talking therapy. If you feel that it isn’t working, and you want to try a different technique, you have every right to do so.

If you have questions about the topics raised in this article, Health Assured are here to help. Contact our expert advisors today on 0844 892 2493.