Understanding your addiction – and how you got here – is one of the first steps toward recovery. However, not everyone truly understands mental health, substance use disorders, process addictions, trauma, and how they impact one another. Thankfully, psychotherapy with expert therapists and clinicians can help with this lack of understanding. In fact, most experts consider counseling an important, if not essential, part of the treatment experience.

What Is Psychotherapy?

woman lays on couch to get psychotherapy

Psychotherapy refers to a wide range of counseling options. Despite each counseling approach involving different techniques, all of them have the same goal. The objective of psychotherapy is to help people with mental health issues and emotional challenges.

Experts typically use these types of addiction treatment therapies to help clients understand their true feelings. Guiding people to understand how they really feel can help them see what makes them anxious or depressed. It can also give therapists insight into the root cause of their addiction.

The goal of counseling sessions is to help people stop focusing on negative thoughts and emotions. The idea is that thoughts and emotions affect behavior. Replacing negative thoughts with positive ones should, in theory, result in positive behaviors.

Counseling Methods

Psychotherapy encompasses a large variety of therapies. All of these therapies have different success rates and are utilized depending on the symptoms and situation for each specific client. While each of these uses different techniques, they all aim to get the same results. Some of the different types of therapies that we offer include:

Psychodynamic Counseling

“Psychodynamic psychotherapy is effective for a wide range of mental health symptoms, including depression, anxiety, panic, and stress-related physical ailments, and the benefits of the therapy grow after treatment has ended” – American Psychological Association 

Psychodynamic counseling is a type of insight-oriented counseling. Its focus is on the roots of emotional suffering. Engaging self-reflection and self-examination, this form of counseling typically deals with people’s upbringing, early life experiences, and problematic relationship patterns. Sometimes early experiences and relationship patterns continue to cause present-day behavioral problems. The progress milestones in this approach include, but are not limited to: identifying where emotional suffering is woven into the client’s life experience; identifying relationship patterns – helpful and those harmful, identifying any existing internal contradictions, and increased awareness of emotional blind spots and what to do about them.

Cognitive Counseling

Cognitive counseling is a popular therapy approach for people with a wide range of problems, including depression, anxiety, addiction, anger, panic, disordered eating, or relationship conflict. It focuses primarily on the idea that how you are thinking, behaving, and communicating today versus early childhood experience. The connection is people’s thoughts shape how they feel and act. 

The progress milestones in this approach include, but are not limited to, identifying thought distortions and skill-building to change the way clients think, which change how they feel and act.  

For example, depression may stem from untrue intrusive thoughts, like feeling useless or unloved. Cognitive-based counseling helps people struggling with these illnesses to change their thoughts in order to remove destructive behaviors.

Interpersonal Counseling

Interpersonal counseling is most often used for individuals experiencing major depression, addiction, anxiety, disordered eating, chronic fatigue, and mood disorders. 

Interpersonal counseling focuses on people’s personal relationships. The goal here is to identify problems or issues that people feel toward others, addressing current problems and relationships. Often, specific people can trigger anger, rage, and fear in those with addiction, mental health diagnosis, and trauma. Interpersonal counseling helps clients overcome these issues and the associated negative emotions. 

The progress milestones in this approach include, but are not limited to: focus on interpersonal relationships, relationship communication, social support, tools for grief and loss, skill-building in starting and sustaining healthy relationships.

This approach has been particularly helpful in recovery maintenance and preventing relapse. 

Get Treatment That You Can Count On at Santé Center

Whether you require psychotherapy or other counseling, you can find what you need at Santé Center for Healing. Our experts and caring staff members aim to provide high levels of care. Our addiction treatment elements include, but are not limited to: 

All of the above are offered across Santé Center for Healing’s recovery continuum of care and addiction treatment options, including:

Our main focus is your full recovery and comfort. While the journey to recovery can be hard to navigate in your first few weeks, you are not alone, and we recognize the importance of being comfortable. We offer a number of amenities to keep you happy and healthy throughout treatment. For example, we offer meditation and other opportunities to help reduce stress and heal your spirit and mind. Likewise, we also provide experiential therapies that let you explore your creative side.

Santé Center for Healing encourages clients to participate in social activities, too. These activities, like sand volleyball, a walking trail, disc golf, and more, help people relax and interact with others, learning to build new relationships in recovery.  

Let us show you how to take control of your life and overcome addiction. Go from just surviving to absolutely thriving. Find out what it takes to manage addiction for both the short and long term. Contact Santé Center for Healing at 866.238.3154 for more information.