Therapy Methods Library

Explore Major Therapy Approaches

Therapy Methods is an educational starting point for understanding how widely used approaches differ. A licensed professional can help assess your needs, goals, diagnosis, preferences, culture, safety, and access.

Important: This library is educational and is not diagnosis, treatment, or a substitute for professional care. Outcomes vary. If you may hurt yourself or someone else, call emergency services. In the U.S., call or text 988; elsewhere use your local crisis service.

Choose an approach

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

A structured approach that explores how thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and actions influence one another. Sessions often include shared goals and between-session practice.

Where it may fit: Often used as part of care for anxiety, depression, phobias, OCD, sleep problems, and other concerns.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

Combines acceptance strategies with behavior-change skills in mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness.

Where it may fit: Comprehensive DBT may include individual therapy, skills groups, coaching, and a therapist consultation team.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Builds psychological flexibility through mindfulness, acceptance, perspective-taking, values, and committed action.

Where it may fit: Used across a range of emotional, behavioral, and health-related concerns; the goal is not to force every difficult feeling to disappear.

Psychodynamic Therapy

Explores recurring emotional and relationship patterns, defenses, earlier experiences, and processes that may operate outside immediate awareness.

Where it may fit: May support work on depression, anxiety, relationship difficulties, personality patterns, and self-understanding.

Person-Centered Therapy

Emphasizes the client's lived experience and capacity for growth in a relationship grounded in empathy, genuineness, and nonjudgmental acceptance.

Where it may fit: Often used in counseling for life transitions, grief, self-esteem, relationship stress, and personal growth.

Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT)

A time-limited, structured therapy that connects emotional symptoms with current relationships and life roles.

Where it may fit: Best known as a treatment for depression, with focus areas such as grief, role transitions, disputes, or isolation.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

A structured trauma-focused psychotherapy that includes preparation, assessment, and processing with bilateral stimulation such as guided eye movements or tapping.

Where it may fit: Supported in guidelines for PTSD. It should be delivered by an appropriately trained clinician after readiness and safety are assessed.

Exposure Therapy

A behavioral treatment, often within CBT, that gradually and repeatedly approaches safe but feared situations, sensations, images, or memories.

Where it may fit: Used in evidence-based protocols for phobias, panic, OCD, and PTSD. Trauma-focused exposure should be clinician-led.

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)

Combines cognitive-therapy ideas with mindfulness practices to help people notice thoughts and feelings without automatically following them.

Where it may fit: Used particularly in relapse prevention for recurrent depression and adapted for other concerns.

Family Therapy

Works with family members to understand how communication, roles, boundaries, culture, development, and stress affect the wider system.

Where it may fit: May help with conflict, transitions, child or adolescent concerns, grief, chronic illness, and the effects of mental health or substance-use conditions.

Couples Therapy

Helps partners examine interaction cycles, communication, trust, intimacy, conflict, and shared decisions.

Where it may fit: Safety screening matters; joint sessions may not be appropriate when coercion or violence is present.

Group Therapy

Brings several participants together with one or more trained facilitators for skills, support, interpersonal learning, or a shared concern.

Where it may fit: A screening conversation helps determine fit, goals, confidentiality expectations, and group structure.

Motivational Interviewing (MI)

A collaborative conversational style that helps people explore mixed feelings and strengthen their own reasons and confidence for change.

Where it may fit: Often integrated into health behavior and substance-use care; it is not a complete treatment for every condition.

Creative Arts Therapies

Use art, music, movement, drama, or writing within a therapeutic relationship. The purpose is therapeutic exploration, not artistic performance.

Where it may fit: Training standards and evidence vary across disciplines and conditions; ask about professional credentials and treatment goals.

How to choose a therapist

  • Ask about credentials, specialty training, and experience with your concern and age group.
  • Ask what approach is proposed, why it fits, how goals will be measured, and what happens if it is not helping.
  • Discuss confidentiality, its limits, fees, insurance, accessibility, and expected time frame.
  • For trauma-focused methods, ask about protocol-specific training, readiness, pacing, and safety planning.

Source basis