Psychotherapy.
Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP)
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Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) is an attachment focussed evidence based psychotherapy founded upon neuroscience and psychodynamic principles. ISTDP comprises of a set of interventions to relieve emotional distress and to promote mental wellbeing by identifying and treating the root cause of an individual’s problems. Being an accelerated form of Psychodynamic Therapy, ISTDP is a highly focused and interactive psychotherapy, where the patient and therapist work collaboratively to identify, understand, and shift the automatic maladaptive unconscious patterns and defence mechanisms comprised of thoughts, emotions, sensations, and behaviours that underlie psychological suffering. This process builds an individual's capacity to tolerate and integrate previously avoided unconscious emotions, leading to lasting and stable change. ISTDP works at a neural level, altering the implicit memory experiences which perpetuate anxiety and distress.
Eye-Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy
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Eye-Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an evidenced-based, comprehensive psychotherapy for the treatment of psychological distress. EMDR works from the premise that the brain has an innate drive toward mental health; an innate capacity to adaptively process information; and is geared to integrate internal and external experiences; and to resolve psychological disturbance. However, improperly encoded memories of traumatic experiences are thought to disrupt this intrinsic information processing system, in turn preventing healing.
EMDR is thought to access these traumatic memories, where through stimulation of the brain’s innate processing system, they can be linked to adaptive memory networks, thereby allowing the characteristics of the memory to change as it transmutes to an adaptive resolution. In other words, EMDR removes the “blockages” that have been caused by trauma, resuming inherent processing as a result, where maladaptive perceptions, emotions, and sensations are discarded, and adaptive information found in other memory networks are assimilated. In turn, this allows the memory to be stored in a new adaptive form, integrated into the individual’s broader life narrative, where the memory is recalled as a distant event, no longer evoking significant distress. The Australian Psychological Society (APS) has classed EMDR as a “Level 1 Treatment” for PTSD, the highest rating that can be applied to an individual therapy framework.