Practical ways of coping with life
This approach to care focuses on providing concrete tools and strategies to better cope with everyday life or workplace stressors, as well as more significant challenges. These strategies may include planning ahead, reframing thoughts and perceptions, taking time to introspect, practicing gratitude, emotion regulation strategies, amongst others.
Behavioural and exposure strategies
This approach to care is based on behavioural therapy and focuses on helping clients confront their fears. When people are fearful of something, they tend to avoid the feared objects, activities or situations. Although this avoidance might help reduce feelings of fear in the short term, over the long term it can make the fear become even worse. In such situations, it may be recommended to use gradual exposure in order to help break the pattern of avoidance and fear.
Feminist-informed
Feminist-informed approach to care is a person centered, politically informed model that positions treatment within a cultural context. Its goals are to empower the person in treatment, enabling that person to potentially address aspects of social transformation, nurture the self and establish a strong self-concept, and restructure and enhance personal beliefs about identity. The understanding that women may experience mental health issues as a result of psychological oppression is a core concept of feminist-informed therapy.
Professional goals are related to what you want to accomplish with your education or your career, while personal goals are generally more connected with your health, happiness, relationships, and well-being. Setting goals helps you remain accountable for the things you want to achieve. This approach to care will allow a person to learn the tools and strategies to set goals that are realistic and attainable while maintaining the motivation to do achieve them.
This approach to care focuses on helping a person develop the skills needed for effective and productive time and task management, for example learning to make decisions, prioritizing, reducing procrastination, delegating, multitasking, scheduling, goal setting, problem solving and strategic thinking skills.
This approach to care uses cognitive therapy to help a person better understand the interconnection between negative thought patterns, ensuing negative emotional responses and how this affects behaviours. The goal is to help a person become aware of these patterns, identify dysfunctional negative thinking, learn to change their patterns to have more realistic thoughts based on facts, and feel more in control of their emotional reactions and behaviours.
Trauma-Informed Care understands and considers the pervasive nature of trauma and promotes environments of healing and recovery rather than practices and services that may inadvertently re-traumatize.
This approach to care will take into account the religious and spiritual issues that may be relevant to the underlying issues that prompt clients to seek treatment. These can include conflicts over religious values, crises of faith, feelings of alienation from one’s religion, and distortion of religious beliefs and practices, among others. The client’s religious and spiritual beliefs and faith community may also be emphasized as sources of strength and support that may be accessed in the course of psychotherapy to assist clients to achieve their treatment goals.
This approach to care focuses on helping clients develop an attitude of acceptance, which can be defined as accepting things as they are in the present moment, without judgment. Clients learn the core principles of mindfulness, which include non-striving, letting go, self-trust, generosity, non-judgment, and the beginner’s mind. These skills have been shown to increase the ability to regulate emotions as well as decrease symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress, and anger, amongst others.
This approach to care focuses on the connection between body and mind and provides tools and strategies to effectively manage mental and body energy in order to enhance holistic well-being.
This approach to care focuses on how changes in life can affect both a person and their relationships. The way we cope with life changes is based on a very individual mix of genes, previous experience, and our environment. We therefore often deal with adjusting to change in very different ways than other people in our lives. The goal is to provide the tools and strategies to better adjust and cope with both positive or negative life transitions, while maintaining healthy relationships with others.