Approaches on Creative Leaps

Psychotherapy and counselling: what talking therapy is

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Talking therapy” is the umbrella term the NHS uses for a family of treatments in which a trained person and a client work through difficulties in conversation. Counselling, psychotherapy, CBT, guided self-help and several other things all sit underneath it.

What it consists of

Stripped to essentials, most talking therapy involves:

A regular, bounded meeting. Usually weekly, usually around fifty minutes, in a private room or by video or telephone. The boundedness is not administrative fussiness — the reliability of the frame is part of what makes it possible to say difficult things.
A working agreement. What the work is for, how long it might run, confidentiality and its limits, and what happens if either party wants to stop.
A method. What the practitioner does with what you bring: examine thought patterns, trace a difficulty back to earlier relationships, attend to what is happening between the two of you in the room, or something else again. See schools of therapy.
Supervision, behind the scenes. Registered practitioners take their work to a supervisor. This is a professional requirement, not a sign of inexperience.

Counselling or psychotherapy?

In UK usage the words overlap heavily and are frequently interchangeable. The rough convention is that counselling tends to be shorter and focused on a present difficulty, and psychotherapy longer and concerned with patterns that recur across a life. But there is no legal definition of either, and plenty of practitioners do both.

The main schools of therapy, and how they differ

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Schools of therapy differ less in what happens in the room than the names suggest, and more in what each thinks the problem is. That is the useful axis, so it is the one used here.

Cognitive behavioural therapy

The problem, as CBT sees it: unhelpful patterns of thinking and behaviour that keep a difficulty going, whatever originally started it.

In the room: structured and collaborative. An agenda, a shared model of what maintains the problem, and tasks between sessions — testing a prediction, keeping a record, gradually approaching what is avoided. Usually time-limited, often twelve to twenty sessions.

Dance movement psychotherapy: what it is

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dance movement psychotherapy (DMP) is a form of psychotherapy that uses movement as its primary material. The premise is that movement is expressive as well as functional — that how a person holds themselves, initiates, stops, takes up space or avoids it, carries information that words either miss or defend against.

It is a small profession, and it is frequently confused with things it is not.

What it is not

It is not a dance class. There is no choreography, no technique to acquire, no standard to meet. Ability to dance is irrelevant, and much of what happens in a session is small — a gesture, a shift of weight, stillness.

Dance movement therapy: what the evidence does and does not show

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This page exists because the honest answer is more useful than an enthusiastic one, and because enthusiasm is easy to find elsewhere.

The short version

The controlled evidence for dance movement therapy is thin. It is not absent, and it is not negative — it is thin: a small number of small trials, of variable and often low quality, in a field that has not yet been studied at the scale that would settle anything.

Arts therapies in the UK, and the protected titles

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The arts therapies are psychological therapies in which an art form is the main medium of the work. They matter for a reason beyond their own practice: they are the clearest illustration in UK mental health of what statutory title protection actually does.

The four protected titles

Art therapist, art psychotherapist, dramatherapist and music therapist are protected in law. Using one without being on the Health and Care Professions Council register is a criminal offence under the Health Professions Order 2001, along with falsely implying that you are entitled to use one.

Mindfulness: origins and what the word now means

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The archived version of this page used the spelling “mindfullness”. The address is preserved; the spelling is not.

The practice

Mindfulness, in the sense used by the clinical programmes, is deliberately paying attention to present experience, without adding judgement to it. In practice that means noticing what is happening — breath, body sensation, sound, thought, feeling — observing that attention has wandered, and returning it, repeatedly and without self-criticism, which turns out to be the difficult part.

MBSR and MBCT: the two clinical programmes

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two programmes account for nearly all the clinical research on mindfulness. They are related, they are frequently confused, and they were built for different jobs.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR)

Built for: people living with chronic illness, pain and stress, at a hospital that had run out of other things to offer them. Developed from 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

Shape: eight weekly group sessions of roughly two and a half hours, a full-day silent session around week six, and daily home practice of around forty-five minutes. The core components are the body scan, sitting meditation, mindful movement drawn from hatha yoga, and enquiry — group discussion of what practice actually threw up, rather than instruction.

Mindfulness: what the trials support, and where claims outrun the evidence

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mindfulness is one of the areas where the gap between what is claimed and what has been shown is widest. Both halves of that sentence matter: there is real evidence, and there is a great deal of overclaiming built on top of it.

What is reasonably well supported

Relapse prevention in recurrent depression. This is the strongest and most specific finding. NICE’s 2022 guideline on depression in adults concluded there was good evidence that group CBT and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy were effective, and on average cost-effective, for people at high risk of relapse, with data covering up to two years. It is recommended as one option among several.