Therapies
What should I Expect from an Initial Session? How long should I expect treatment will take? What psychological treatment will work best for me? Learn more about how your CFIR clinician will work with you and about psychological treatments.
What Should I Expect from an Initial Session?
Here’s what you can expect in your first meeting with a CFIR clinician.
What will my initial session look like at CFIR?
- In addition to the initial session with your clinician, you will be offered 2 hours of questionnaires called the “General Battery Assessment”. This assessment consists of a series of questionnaires that you can complete online from home. While you can complete the questionnaires at any time, it is highly recommended that you do so at least 48 hours prior to your meeting with your clinician.
- During the scheduled meeting with your clinician, you will have the opportunity to share your concerns and the issues you would like to address in your treatment sessions. Together you and your clinician will collaboratively identify your therapy goals.
- Your clinician will also use the questionnaire information gathered to understand your concerns or distress, if you have had the chance to complete them beforehand. Please attend your initial session whether you have completed these questionnaires or not.
Why administer 2 hours of questionnaires as part of my initial session?
- The questionnaires are scientific, evidence-based measures that provide your clinician with important information that will be used for your treatment. These questionnaires will help your clinician to understand your presenting concerns and the nature of your distress. The measures provide important information about the cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and interpersonal aspects of your distress and difficulties.
- The questionnaires might also help reduce the time, and costs at the beginning of your therapeutic journey. For context, many therapists typically need to use the first 3 to 4 sessions to assess a new client’s history and areas of concern. The questionnaires can help to streamline this initial phase of the therapy process and might be covered by your insurance plan if applicable.
What will happen during my initial 1-hour session with my CFIR clinician?
- Your CFIR clinician will conduct a clinical interview in which they will listen to you to understand the concerns and/or distress you have been experiencing and ask you questions.
- Your clinician will use the information from the questionnaires to ask further questions to gain a deeper understanding of you. As the session unfolds, your clinician will provide you feedback about the questionnaires. Sometimes feedback from the questionnaires will be given gradually over a few sessions.
- Collaboratively you and your clinician will use the interview and questionnaires to establish your goals for therapy and to plan your treatment. Your clinician can also discuss the approximate number of sessions that may be required based on your discussion and questionnaire information gathered.
- If you are experiencing high levels of distress and unmanageable symptoms in your first session, your clinician will provide you with strategies to address these symptoms prior to the interview and prior to providing questionnaire feedback.
- Your CFIR clinician will also be able to provide you with a general sequence of how change may occur, what progress is to be expected and the length of time this may take.
What treatment approach will my CFIR clinician use and how many sessions are needed?
- Your CFIR clinician will make recommendations about treatment approaches, or a combination of approaches that may be required to help you with your presenting issues. Your clinician will tailor your treatment approach to your concerns, needs, and personal preferences or previous therapy experiences.
- Your CFIR clinician will be experienced in many different treatment approaches. At CFIR, we believe that not every treatment fits with every client, and therefore, value our Associates’ abilities to flexibly address concerns using different treatment approaches (e.g., our clinicians can employ cognitive-behavioral, emotion-focused, psychodynamic, and systemic approaches among many others).
- Our clinicians are trained and experienced to address the perceptual, cognitive, emotional, behavioral, interpersonal, and socio-cultural dimensions of your concerns.
- Your CFIR clinician can also offer you various short and long-term evidence-based treatment options.
- Below, we have provided you a table that outlines information about what you may expect in terms of treatment duration for a wide range of psychological issues.
- Speak to your clinician about these findings, about treatment duration, and how they may apply to you.
Therapies Overview
There are over 400 psychotherapies out there! What psychological treatment will work best for me?
With so many different brands of therapy, it’s difficult for you, the consumer of psychotherapy services, to figure out which treatment might best be suited for you and your needs. Some treatments have been subject to rigorous scientific investigations in clinical trial studies and have been found to produce significant clinical changes in study participants. It’s safe to say though that none of these treatment approaches work for every child, adolescent, adult, couple or family for any particular problem. At CFIR, our psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors are trained and skilled in providing different types of psychological treatments for this very reason.
At our Centre, we believe it is important for your clinician to be able to be flexible in offering a variety of scientific, evidence-based treatments—to address the cognitive, emotional, behavioural and relational aspects of your concerns—and to offer you different possibilities for change—particularly because we know that no one treatment fits all!
Different treatments focus on different aspects of your concerns, including behaviours, cognitions, emotions, perceptions, and relationships. Below is a list of some of the scientific, evidence-based psychological treatments available at our Centre along with the focus of the treatment approach:
Systemic Therapy
This is a form of psychotherapy that understands problems evolving in interactions and interaction patterns with other individuals and systems. Treatment focuses on the impact of your couple partner, children, family, work and socio-cultural system on your self and on your relationship with others.
Acceptance and Commitment, Compassion & Mindfulness-based therapies (ACT, MBSR)
These are forms of psychotherapy that support an individual to learn how to observe, be less reactive, accept and be non-judgmental of internal thoughts or emotional reactions. ACT supports you to act on the basis of core values as opposed to being entangled in the thoughts and emotional reactions that are at the root of your concerns. Developing a more compassionate outlook towards your self is also important for remediation of various mental health concerns. Treatment focuses on developing the capacity to observe, adopt a non-judgemental stance toward thoughts and feelings, and diminish reactivity, while anchoring the self in core values to promote clarity in thinking and action.
Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT)
This is a form of psychotherapy that addresses psychological issues by focusing primarily on the cognitive and behavioural dimensions of your emotional and behavioural concerns (i.e., the way that your thoughts, beliefs or thinking influences your emotional and behavioural responses). CBT also focuses on problem solving, finding solutions, improving coping, helping clients to challenge distorted cognitions (e.g., thoughts, beliefs) and change problematic behaviours. Your emotional or behavioural responses are also changed through exposure to specific situations, cues, narratives or places that trigger distress and maladaptive responses. Homework is often assigned.
Dialectical-behaviour therapy (DBT)
This is a form of psychotherapy that addresses emotional distress and many other issues by focusing on improving distress tolerance, emotion regulation and interpersonal skills, and by supporting individuals to enhance mindfulness practice. The treatment was originally designed for suicidal patients or those diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
Emotion(ally)-focused therapy (EFT)
This is a form of psychotherapy that treats problems by supporting clients to access and express their complex feelings and emotions. Treatment primarily focuses on the emotional dimension of your and your loved ones’ concerns. Emotional responses are targeted and viewed as the primary mechanism of change. Unprocessed secondary or maladaptive emotional responses overlay more adaptive emotional responses. Accessing and expressing more adaptive primary emotions allows us to recognize our goals, concerns and attachment needs, and promotes adaptive self-growth and more secure relationships.
Existential-humanistic therapy
This is a form of psychotherapy that includes other therapies, such as, client-centered, existential and gestalt therapies. These therapies support an individual to explore deeper personal meanings, gain greater self-awareness and facilitate self-growth by helping clients to remove blocks to access disowned feelings and own and realize their inner potentials. Anxiety and depression result from disowned feelings and unrealized potentials. Treatment primarily focuses on accessing inner emotional experience and potentials and removing blocks to expression and possibilities.
Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing
This is a form of treatment that was originally developed in the context of treating patients to deal with and process distressing memories of past traumatic experiences. It is currently used to treat a wider range of psychological issues. Treatment uses bilateral stimulation (visual or auditory) with a primary focus on the integration of distressing aspects of past, and present experiences and increasing adaptation and resilience by building inner resources to address these experiences.
Motivational Interviewing
is form of counseling that helps individuals achieve changes by increasing their motivation to change difficult behaviours. Treatment targets ambivalences about changing, and becoming increasingly aware of the problems, consequences and risks of these behaviours. Motivation is increased to create a better future consistent with an individual’s values and principles.
Psychodynamic, Attachment-based, Mentalization Therapies
These therapies focus on how past and current relationship experiences have influenced a person’s present patterns (i.e., thoughts, thinking about self and other, emotional reactions toward self and others, and behaviours) and relationships. Psychoanalytic-oriented approaches have a rich, historical tradition beginning with Freud and Jung to present-day psychodynamic approaches that have been validated scientifically. The goals of psychodynamic-mentalization and attachment-based therapies are to increase an individual’s self-awareness about these patterns to promote change in the present-day. Concerns flow from internal conflicts, dynamics and patterns that create difficulties for our self and block us from creating meaningful lives and relationships. Defenses and self-protective strategies that block access to earlier emotionally overwhelming experiences are diminished over time to promote more adaptive functioning, self-growth and change. Treatment focuses on cognition, emotion, and interpersonal dimensions of your difficulties. Your interpersonal relationships—both with your therapist and others–are explored to understand and change how one experiences one self and relates to others in interpersonal relationships. These approaches tend to focus on the self and relational issues underlying your symptoms and distress, as opposed to targeting symptoms directly.
Reconsolidation Therapy for PTSD/Trauma
Reconsolidation Therapy is a relatively new PTSD treatment that targets the memory of the traumatic event itself, and is showing promising results in research studies. Reconsolidation therapy combines PTSD psychotherapy that works to activate the traumatic memory with the use of a medication (a beta-blocker called propranolol) that decreases the intensity of emotions associated with the traumatic memory. Research has shown after six, weekly sessions the emotional content of the traumatic memory is modified during reconsolidation therapy and consequently the symptoms of PTSD can decrease significantly. Reconsolidation Therapy works best when a single traumatic event is focused on in the treatment (e.g., sexual assault, physical assault, accident, etc.).
Art Therapy
This is a form of psychotherapy which utilizes creative and spontaneous processes to explore self-expression and insight.
Various art media, such as drawing, painting, collage and sculpture/clay are used to articulate emotions, respond to conflicts, engage in self-reflection, identify strengths and build resources. Art therapy does not necessitate previous artistic skill or training.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy views that each person’s psyche is composed of various parts, each with its own perspective, emotions, and motivations. This therapeutic approach focuses on understanding and healing the relationships between these parts to foster inner harmony and balance. IFS recognizes that these various parts as adaptive responses to life experiences and that they carry valuable qualities and functions. The goal of IFS is to unburden parts of the psyche from the pain and trauma they hold, to restore their true nature, and in doing so strengthen a person’s sense of Self. Through the journey of IFS, individuals are encouraged to develop a deeper understanding of their inner world, to embrace their parts with compassion, and to cultivate a more integrated and empowered sense of self.
