Dictionary of All Models of Psychotherapy
The history of psychotherapy is a long argument about where suffering lives and how it can be reached. The earliest depth psychologies looked for it in buried conflict and forgotten memory. Behaviorism relocated it to observable habit and conditioned response. The humanists answered that the real wound was inauthenticity and the loss of meaning, and more recently clinicians have learned to find distress encoded in the body itself, in the posture, the breath, and the quiet machinery of the autonomic nervous system.
This dictionary gathers that whole sprawling inheritance in one place, including the corners most references leave out: the culturally specific healing systems of the Pacific, Asia, Africa and the Americas; the religious and contemplative traditions that predate the clinic; the energy and breath practices at the edge of the evidence; the psychedelic and technological methods now arriving; and the historical curiosities and outright dangerous fads that the field has tried and abandoned. Every entry offers a short clinical description of what the approach believes and how it works. Where an in-depth article exists, a button links to it. Where the innovator has been written about, a second button links to their story. Where an outside reference exists, a third links out.
Psychoanalytic, Psychodynamic and Depth 75 models
Psychoanalysis Depth Established
The original depth psychology formulated by Sigmund Freud. It relies on free association, dream interpretation, and the analysis of resistance to uncover repressed sexual and aggressive drives.
Classical Adlerian Psychotherapy Depth Established
Developed by Alfred Adler, this approach views the individual holistically within their social context. It emphasizes overcoming feelings of inferiority and fostering social interest to achieve personal growth.
Ego Psychology Depth Established
An evolution of Freudian theory focusing heavily on the ego's adaptive and defensive functions. It aims to strengthen the ego so the patient can better manage environmental stressors and internal impulses.
Object Relations Therapy Depth Established
Focuses on how early relationships with primary caregivers, the objects, are internalized and shape future interpersonal functioning. Therapy corrects maladaptive internal representations to improve current relationship dynamics.
Self Psychology Depth Established
Formulated by Heinz Kohut, this model emphasizes the development of a cohesive self through the mirroring and empathic attunement of the therapist. It primarily targets narcissistic vulnerabilities and self-esteem deficits.
Interpersonal Psychoanalysis Depth Established
Developed by Harry Stack Sullivan, this therapy shifts the focus from internal drives to interpersonal interactions. It posits that psychiatric disorders are rooted in dysfunctional communication and interpersonal relations.
Relational Psychoanalysis Depth Established
Integrates interpersonal psychoanalysis and object relations theory, emphasizing the mutual, co-created relationship between therapist and patient. The therapeutic relationship itself is the primary vehicle for healing.
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Depth Evidence-based
A broader, often briefer application of psychoanalytic principles focusing on unconscious processes and how they manifest in present behavior. It targets symptom relief alongside deep personality change.
Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) Depth Emerging
Focuses on rapidly healing attachment trauma by fostering a deeply corrective emotional experience. The therapist uses explicitly affirming, emotionally engaged techniques to undo the patient's aloneness.
Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) Depth Evidence-based
An accelerated psychodynamic approach that directly challenges psychological defenses. It aims to quickly access unexpressed, unconscious emotions to provide rapid symptom relief.
Brief Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Depth Evidence-based
A time-limited psychodynamic framework focusing on specific, current problems rather than a complete restructuring of the personality. It establishes clear goals to achieve rapid, targeted clinical outcomes.
Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) Depth Evidence-based
Designed originally for borderline personality disorder, this therapy enhances a patient's capacity to understand their own and others' mental states. It stabilizes emotional regulation by improving reflective functioning.
Transference Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) Depth Evidence-based
A highly structured psychodynamic treatment for severe personality disorders. It uses the real-time analysis of the patient-therapist transference to integrate split-off, polarized aspects of the self.
Dynamic Deconstructive Psychotherapy Depth Emerging
Designed for treatment-resistant conditions and co-occurring disorders. It helps patients connect with their authentic emotional experiences and develop more adaptive ways of relating to themselves and others.
Horneyan Psychoanalysis Depth Established
Based on the work of Karen Horney, this approach rejects Freudian biological determinism in favor of social and cultural influences. It targets the tyranny of the shoulds and neurotic strategies for coping with basic anxiety.
Lacanian Psychoanalysis Depth Established
Rooted in the linguistic and structuralist theories of Jacques Lacan. It emphasizes that the unconscious is structured like a language and deeply analyzes the patient's discourse to deconstruct the ego.
Supportive Psychotherapy Depth Established
Focuses on improving social functioning and coping skills rather than achieving deep insight. It aims to bolster adaptive defenses, reduce anxiety, and maintain optimal ego functioning.
Conversational Model Depth Emerging
A psychodynamic approach focusing on the development of a shared language between therapist and patient. It is particularly effective for patients dealing with complex trauma and borderline personality organization.
Insight-Oriented Psychotherapy Depth Established
An umbrella term for therapies that assume symptoms resolve when a patient gains conscious awareness of their underlying psychological conflicts. It relies heavily on interpretation and self-reflection.
Interpersonal Reconstructive Therapy (IRT) Depth Emerging
Designed for treatment-resistant patients, this model identifies the internalized, maladaptive rules learned from early caregivers. It helps patients consciously choose to break these rules to establish healthier interpersonal patterns.
Time-Limited Dynamic Psychotherapy (TLDP) Depth Evidence-based
Focuses on changing cyclical maladaptive patterns of interpersonal relating within a set timeframe. The therapist actively uses the therapeutic relationship to provide a new, corrective relational experience.
Affect Phobia Therapy Depth Emerging
A psychodynamic approach that treats emotional avoidance as a phobia. It uses exposure techniques to help patients confront and tolerate avoided feelings, leading to emotional restructuring.
Control-Mastery Theory Depth Emerging
A cognitive-psychodynamic theory suggesting that psychopathology stems from pathogenic beliefs acquired in childhood. Therapy provides experiences that disconfirm these beliefs, allowing the patient to feel safe and adapt.
Jungian Analysis (Analytical Psychology) Depth Established
Explores the personal and collective unconscious through dream analysis and symbolism. It frames clinical symptoms as blocked creative energy and strives for the ultimate goal of individuation.
Archetypal Psychology Depth Established
Pioneered by James Hillman, it expands Jungian thought by de-centering the ego. It views psychological phenomena as being driven by universal, mythological archetypes shaping the soul of the individual.
Parts-Based Therapy Depth Emerging
A clinical framework positing that the mind is naturally multiple. It treats symptoms like addiction or panic as protective parts of the personality acting out, working to negotiate with these parts rather than suppress them.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) Depth Evidence-based
Developed by Richard Schwartz, this evidence-based parts therapy categorizes the psyche into Managers, Firefighters, and wounded Exiles. The goal is to unblend these parts and restore the core Self to systemic leadership.
Voice Dialogue (Psychology of Selves) Depth Fringe
Created by Hal and Sidra Stone, it involves the therapist interviewing different sub-personalities directly. This helps the client develop an Aware Ego capable of holding the tension between opposites.
Shadow Work Depth Established
A core Jungian clinical technique that involves identifying and integrating the repressed, socially unacceptable aspects of the personality. Reclaiming this dark material prevents it from being unconsciously projected onto others.
Dream Analysis Depth Established
Treating dreams not as random neural firing but as functional, compensatory messages from the unconscious. It decodes symbols to resolve waking-life emotional impasses and neuroses.
Active Imagination Depth Established
A sophisticated Jungian meditative technique where the patient actively converses with unconscious images, personified emotions, or archetypes. This allows the patient to consciously negotiate internal psychological conflicts.
Ego-State Therapy Depth Emerging
Similar to parts-based models, it frequently uses hypnosis to identify, isolate, and communicate with conflicting states of the ego. These states often hold specific trauma or perform specific survival functions.
Process-Oriented Psychology Depth Fringe
Developed by Arnold Mindell, it expands Jungian analysis into somatic and systemic realms. It tracks the process of symptoms as they manifest in body symptoms, relationship conflicts, and social tensions.
Sandplay Therapy Depth Established
A non-verbal, symbolic depth therapy where clients arrange miniature figures in a sandbox. It bypasses cognitive defenses, allowing the unconscious to visually map out and resolve pre-verbal trauma.
Psychosynthesis Depth Established
Developed by Roberto Assagioli, it integrates spiritual and psychological elements. It aims to synthesize various sub-personalities under the direction of a unifying, transpersonal Self.
Developmental Needs Meeting Strategy (DNMS) Depth Fringe
A parts-based, ego-state therapy specifically targeting attachment wounds. It establishes a Resource Team of internal adult parts to reparent and heal wounded child parts.
King, Warrior, Magician, Lover Depth Fringe
Derived from Robert Moore's theories, this approach structures initiation rites for the modern world. It helps patients integrate mature archetypal energy to heal their Shadow.
Inner Child Work Depth Established
A widely used integrative approach targeting the emotional memory of childhood. Therapy focuses on safely accessing, validating, and reparenting the vulnerable exile to heal developmental trauma.
Daseinsanalysis Depth Established
An existential-phenomenological approach deeply influenced by Martin Heidegger. It explores how the individual illuminates their distinct being-in-the-world and interacts with their immediate ontological reality.
Psychoanalytic Child Therapy Depth Established
Adapts psychoanalytic principles to the developmental stage of children, heavily using play to uncover unconscious conflicts. It focuses on the early formation of defense mechanisms.
Institutional Psychotherapy Depth Historical
A psychiatric movement originating in France that views the psychiatric institution itself as a therapeutic tool. It aims to cure the institution of oppressive structures to better cure the patient.
Status Dynamic Psychotherapy Depth Fringe
Formulated by Peter Ossorio and based on Descriptive Psychology. It focuses on the patient's status, their place in the world, and how their behavior aligns with or violates that status.
Depth Psychology Depth Established
The overarching paradigm that encompasses psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology. It asserts that surface symptoms are merely manifestations of deep, unseen psychic architectures that must be unearthed.
Post-Rationalist Cognitive Therapy Depth Emerging
Integrates cognitive therapy with evolutionary epistemology and attachment theory. It focuses on how an individual's unique emotional organization actively constructs their personal reality.
Symbolic Analysis Depth Established
A therapeutic technique used within depth psychology to decode the latent meaning behind a patient's behavioral quirks, artistic creations, and somatic symptoms.
Abreaction Therapy Depth Historical
An early psychoanalytic technique focusing on the vivid recall of traumatic events to release pent-up emotional energy. The cathartic release is intended to purge the pathogenic memory from the psyche.
Identity-Oriented Psychotrauma Therapy (IoPT) Depth Fringe
Developed by Franz Ruppert, this method uses the intention method and constellation work to distinguish healthy, traumatized, and survival parts of the self. It works toward reintegrating split-off identity after early trauma.
Will Therapy Depth Historical
Otto Rank's post-Freudian approach centered the client's will, creativity and the living present of the therapeutic relationship rather than the archaeology of childhood. It directly shaped Carl Rogers and the later relational schools.
Ferenczi's Active Technique and Mutual Analysis Depth Historical
Ferenczi experimented with a warmer, more active analytic stance, at one point allowing patients to analyze him in turn. Scandalous in his lifetime, the work anticipated relational psychoanalysis and modern trauma theory.
Stekel's Active Analysis Depth Historical
A shortened, intuitive form of analysis in which the analyst confronts symbolism and resistance directly rather than waiting for free association to unfold. Stekel's speed and self-confidence alienated Freud but foreshadowed brief dynamic therapy.
Corrective Emotional Experience (Chicago School) Depth Established
Alexander argued that change comes less from insight than from re-experiencing old conflicts with a therapist who responds differently than the original figures did. The idea now underpins most experiential and relational therapies.
Winnicottian Psychoanalysis Depth Established
Built on Winnicott's concepts of the good-enough mother, the holding environment, transitional objects and the true and false self. Therapy offers a reliable, non-impinging space in which a patient's authentic self can finally emerge.
Bionian Psychoanalysis Depth Established
Bion described how the analyst contains and metabolizes the patient's unbearable raw experience so it can be thought about. His theory of container and contained shapes how analysts work with psychosis and primitive states.
Attachment-Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Depth Evidence-based
Applies Bowlby's attachment theory inside a psychodynamic frame, treating the therapist as a secure base from which internal working models of relationship are explored and revised. It links early separation and loss to adult patterns of intimacy.
Fairbairnian Object Relations Depth Established
Fairbairn replaced Freud's pleasure-seeking libido with an object-seeking one, describing how children split off frustrating aspects of caregivers into internal saboteurs and exciting objects. Therapy loosens loyalty to these bad internal objects.
Kleinian Play Technique Depth Established
Klein treated a child's spontaneous play as the equivalent of adult free association and interpreted its unconscious phantasy directly. The technique founded child analysis and introduced the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.
Intersubjective Systems Theory Depth Established
Views every analytic encounter as a field created by two differently organized subjectivities rather than one expert observing another. Emotional trauma is understood as experience that never found a relational home.
Cyclical Psychodynamics Depth Emerging
Wachtel's integrative model shows how unconscious conflicts are perpetuated by present-day behavior and the reactions it draws from others. It combines psychodynamic understanding with active behavioral and systemic intervention.
Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy (DIT) Depth Evidence-based
A sixteen-session manualized psychodynamic treatment for depression developed for the UK health service. It identifies one core interpersonal-affective focus and works it through the relationship and outside life.
Psychodynamic Interpersonal Therapy (PIT) Depth Evidence-based
A brief, research-tested development of the Conversational Model used in Britain for depression, self-harm and functional somatic symptoms. It uses tentative, feeling-focused language to build a shared understanding of the patient's inner life.
Balint Groups Depth Established
Case-discussion groups in which physicians explore the emotional dimension of the doctor-patient relationship. Balint used psychoanalytic ideas to help general practitioners recognize what their patients were really asking for.
Existential Psychoanalysis Depth Historical
Sartre proposed replacing the Freudian unconscious with a person's original, freely chosen project of being. Analysis uncovers this fundamental choice rather than a buried drive.
Fromm's Humanistic Psychoanalysis Depth Established
Fromm read neurosis as the failure to resolve the human predicaments of freedom, separateness and rootlessness within a given society. Therapy aims at productive love and reason rather than mere adjustment.
Erikson's Psychosocial Approach Depth Established
Locates psychological difficulty in unresolved crises of the eight life stages, from basic trust in infancy to integrity in old age. Clinicians use the model to understand identity, generativity and life-course transitions.
Separation-Individuation Framework Depth Established
Mahler's observational research mapped how the infant hatches from symbiosis with the mother into a separate self. Her phases guide dynamic work with borderline and narcissistic difficulties understood as failures of rapprochement.
Kernbergian Object Relations Depth Established
Kernberg's model of borderline personality organization describes identity diffusion, primitive defenses and unstable reality testing. It supplies the diagnostic backbone for transference-focused psychotherapy.
Malan's Brief Dynamic Therapy Depth Established
Malan's Tavistock research showed that carefully selected patients could achieve deep change in short therapies organized around a clear focus. His triangles of conflict and person remain teaching staples.
Sifneos Short-Term Anxiety-Provoking Psychotherapy Depth Historical
A confrontational brief therapy for well-functioning patients with oedipal conflicts, in which the therapist deliberately provokes anxiety to accelerate insight. Its strict selection criteria limited its reach.
Mann's Time-Limited Psychotherapy Depth Historical
A fixed twelve-session model that uses the approaching end of therapy itself as the central theme. Working through the loss of the therapist is meant to resolve the patient's core issue of separation.
Adlerian Brief Therapy Depth Established
A contemporary distillation of Adler's method into a few sessions of lifestyle assessment, early-recollection analysis and encouragement. It targets the mistaken private logic behind a client's presenting problem.
Trauma Model Therapy Depth Emerging
Ross's approach to dissociative and complex trauma treats attachment to the perpetrator and the locus-of-control shift as the core problems to be worked through. It uses structured cognitive and experiential techniques within a phased frame.
Structural Dissociation Model Depth Emerging
Describes trauma survivors as divided between an apparently normal part that carries on daily life and emotional parts stuck in defensive responses. Phase-oriented treatment integrates these parts through stabilization and guided synthesis.
Wounded Healer Model Depth Established
A Jungian archetypal frame holding that the therapist's own suffering is the source of their capacity to heal others. Clinically it guides the use of countertransference and the therapist's self-awareness.
Psychoanalytic Self-Analysis Depth Historical
Horney's 1942 program for applying analytic tools to oneself between or instead of sessions. It remains a reference point for structured introspective practice within depth psychology.
Neo-Freudian Culturalist Analysis Depth Historical
Kardiner and colleagues fused psychoanalysis with anthropology, arguing that each culture forms a basic personality structure through its child-rearing practices. The approach influenced cross-cultural psychiatry and trauma studies.
Cognitive, Behavioral and Third-Wave 118 models
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
The most widely researched psychotherapeutic model, focusing on the reciprocal relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It identifies and restructures cognitive distortions to alleviate clinical symptoms.
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Founded by Albert Ellis, this active-directive approach challenges irrational, self-defeating beliefs. It pushes patients to dispute rigid demands, the musts and shoulds, to achieve emotional resilience.
Behavior Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Grounded purely in learning theory, targeting the modification of observable behavior. It uses techniques like systematic desensitization and operant conditioning without focusing on cognitive restructuring.
Clinical Behavior Analysis Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
The application of radical behaviorism to clinical, outpatient settings. It views verbal behavior and private events, including thoughts, as behaviors subject to the same principles of reinforcement.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Developed by Marsha Linehan, it combines CBT with Zen mindfulness to treat severe emotional dysregulation. It balances the dialectic of radical acceptance with the push for behavioral change.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Focuses on psychological flexibility by encouraging patients to accept unavoidable negative emotions. It relies heavily on cognitive defusion while committing to values-based actions.
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A specialized trauma therapy that helps patients identify and change stuck points, the unhelpful beliefs about a trauma. It structurally challenges thoughts regarding safety, trust, and control.
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
An evidence-based treatment for children and adolescents impacted by trauma. It combines trauma-sensitive interventions with cognitive behavioral, family, and humanistic principles.
Exposure Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A behavioral intervention using gradual, repeated exposure to feared stimuli or memories in a safe environment. It aims to extinguish the fear response and reduce avoidance behaviors.
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
The gold-standard behavioral treatment for OCD. Patients are exposed to obsession-triggering stimuli and are actively prevented from engaging in their compulsive neutralizing rituals.
Systematic Desensitization Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A classical conditioning technique where a patient is gradually exposed to progressively more anxiety-provoking stimuli while simultaneously engaging in competing relaxation techniques.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A highly structured intervention targeting the cognitive and behavioral factors perpetuating sleep disruption. It uses stimulus control, sleep restriction, and strict sleep hygiene protocols.
Schema Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Integrates CBT, psychodynamic, and experiential elements to treat chronic characterological issues. It identifies and heals deeply entrenched Early Maladaptive Schemas formed in childhood.
Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP) Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
A behavioral therapy that uses the therapist-client relationship to shape interpersonal behavior in real time. It reinforces naturally occurring, adaptive behaviors during the session.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Combines traditional cognitive therapy with mindfulness practices to prevent depressive relapse. It teaches patients to observe negative thoughts objectively rather than engaging with them.
Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Blends cognitive psychology with psychoanalytic object relations theory. It focuses on identifying chain sequences of maladaptive behaviors and developing new, functional relational templates.
Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy (CBASP) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Designed for chronic depression, focusing on the interpersonal consequences of behavior. It aims to correct the patient's perceived disconnect between their actions and environmental outcomes.
Behavior Modification Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
An umbrella term for interventions relying on operant conditioning, rewards and punishments, to shape behavior. It is frequently applied in institutional, educational, and pediatric settings.
Habit Reversal Training Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A behavioral intervention used primarily for tic disorders and body-focused repetitive behaviors. It involves awareness training and the implementation of a competing, incompatible physical response.
Aversion Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Historical
A conditioning technique where an undesirable behavior is paired with an unpleasant stimulus to reduce the behavior's frequency. It has largely fallen out of modern clinical favor due to ethical concerns.
Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Shifts the focus from the content of negative thoughts to the patient's beliefs about their own thinking. It targets the Cognitive Attentional Syndrome, worry and rumination, driving anxiety and depression.
Metacognitive Training Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Similar to MCT but largely applied to psychosis and schizophrenia. It helps patients become aware of and correct cognitive biases, like jumping to conclusions, that fuel delusions.
Mode Deactivation Therapy (MDT) Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
Developed for adolescents with complex trauma and behavioral issues. It addresses the modes, or belief systems, that trigger aggressive or oppositional behaviors, functioning as an alternative to standard CBT.
Rational Living Therapy (RLT) Cognitive / Behavioral Fringe
A variant of cognitive-behavioral therapy that incorporates elements of brain-based learning. It is highly didactic and focuses on long-term rational skill acquisition.
Progressive Counting Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
A trauma-processing technique derived from EMDR and exposure therapy. The patient briefly visualizes a traumatic memory while the therapist counts, progressively increasing the duration of exposure.
Contingency Management Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A behavior analytic approach heavily used in addiction treatment. It involves the systematic delivery of tangible rewards for verifiable clinical milestones, such as negative drug tests.
Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
The systematic application of behavioral principles to improve socially significant behaviors. It is the most common, though highly debated, intervention used for Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Stimulus Control Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A behavioral intervention focused on removing cues that trigger maladaptive behaviors. At the same time it establishes new environmental cues that promote desired behaviors, used in sleep and addiction therapies.
Token Economy Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A highly structured operant conditioning system where patients earn secondary reinforcers, tokens, for positive behaviors. These tokens can then be exchanged for primary rewards or privileges.
Chaining Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A behavioral technique used to teach complex actions by breaking them into smaller, sequential steps. The patient learns the sequence forward or backward until mastery is achieved.
Shaping Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A conditioning paradigm where the therapist heavily reinforces successive approximations of the target behavior. It is used to teach behaviors the patient currently cannot perform at all.
Counterconditioning Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A classical conditioning technique aiming to replace a maladaptive response to a stimulus with a new, adaptive response. This is often achieved through reciprocal inhibition.
Cognitive Restructuring Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
The core clinical technique of CBT involving the collaborative identification of cognitive distortions. The therapist and client then systematically dispute and modify these irrational beliefs.
Affect Labeling Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A regulatory technique involving the verbal identification and labeling of emotional states. Functional neuroimaging shows this process effectively down-regulates hyperactive amygdala activation.
Decoupling Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
A behavioral technique explicitly designed for body-focused repetitive behaviors. It redirects the physical movement of the compulsion into a harmless, alternative motor pathway.
Association Splitting Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
A cognitive technique designed for OCD that systematically weakens the automatic associations between a trigger and an obsessive fear. It does this by creating competing, neutral associative networks.
Counting Method Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
A brief exposure therapy where the therapist counts aloud while the client visualizes a traumatic event. This process rigidly paces the nervous system's exposure to the distressing memory.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A secular, highly structured eight-week program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. It systematically trains patients in mindfulness meditation and body scanning to manage chronic pain and stress.
Motivational Interviewing (MI) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A collaborative, client-centered conversational style designed to strengthen personal motivation for change. It works by eliciting and exploring the person's own reasons for behavioral modification.
Motivational Enhancement Therapy (MET) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
An adaptation of Motivational Interviewing heavily used in substance abuse treatment. It is designed to rapidly resolve clinical ambivalence regarding engaging in long-term recovery.
Transtheoretical Model (Stages of Change) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A behavioral model tracking a patient's readiness to act on a new healthy behavior. It divides the therapeutic process into precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.
Reality Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Established
Developed by William Glasser, this approach focuses on the present and emphasizes personal responsibility. It helps clients evaluate whether their current actions are effectively meeting their basic psychological needs.
Method of Levels (MOL) Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
A transdiagnostic cognitive therapy based on Perceptual Control Theory. The therapist acts as a facilitator, constantly bringing the client's attention to the background thoughts controlling their distress.
Personal Construct Psychology Cognitive / Behavioral Established
Developed by George Kelly, this theory posits that people act as scientists, constructing hypotheses about the world. Therapy helps clients test and selectively revise these internal constructs.
Cognitive Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Developed by Aaron Beck, this is the precursor and foundational component of modern CBT. It isolates and challenges the cognitive triad of negative thoughts regarding the self, the world, and the future.
Trauma Systems Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A comprehensive, phased model treating traumatized children and adolescents. It addresses both the child's emotional dysregulation and the specific structural failures in their social environment.
Behavioral Activation Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A standalone behavioral intervention highly effective for clinical depression. It involves scheduling activities that naturally generate positive reinforcement, breaking the cycle of depressive withdrawal.
Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A specialized, evidence-based trauma intervention for survivors of complex, multiple traumas, often used with refugees. The client constructs a chronological narrative of their life, contextualizing traumatic experiences.
Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A modern adaptation of exposure therapy using immersive virtual environments. It allows therapists to simulate highly controlled exposures to phobias, such as a fear of flying or combat trauma.
Problem-Solving Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A brief cognitive-behavioral intervention that teaches individuals to systematically identify life problems and generate viable solutions. It reduces the paralysis and overwhelm associated with depressive episodes.
Stress Inoculation Training Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A cognitive-behavioral approach that prepares individuals for future stressors. It teaches coping skills and exposes patients to mild, manageable stress to build psychological immunity.
Relaxation Training Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A foundational behavioral technique involving progressive muscle relaxation and diaphragmatic breathing. It directly counteracts the physiological hyperarousal associated with anxiety disorders.
Autogenic Training Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A relaxation technique relying on self-directed visualization and verbal commands. It overrides the stress response and induces a deep parasympathetic state.
Assertiveness Training Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A behavioral protocol designed to help individuals stand up for their rights and express their feelings directly. It aims to reduce interpersonal anxiety and eliminate passive-aggressive communication patterns.
Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Developed for individuals suffering from high levels of shame and self-criticism. It teaches clients to cultivate self-compassion to actively soothe their threat-based neurobiological systems.
Clinical Hypnotherapy Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Uses deep relaxation and focused attention to bypass the critical conscious mind. This allows for the direct suggestion of cognitive changes and the exploration of implicit memory.
Acceptance Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Established
A predecessor to ACT that emphasizes the clinical utility of acknowledging reality without attempting to alter it. It reduces the secondary suffering caused by actively fighting against negative emotions.
Coherence Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
Developed by Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley, this experiential model surfaces the hidden emotional truth that makes a symptom necessary. It then uses memory reconsolidation to dissolve that emotional learning at its root.
Self-System Therapy (SST) Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
A structured, research-based approach treating depression through the lens of self-regulation. It targets how a person pursues goals and responds to success and failure, repairing a stalled promotion and prevention system.
Morita Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Established
A structured Japanese approach from 1919 that treats anxious, self-focused suffering by teaching acceptance of feelings as they are while taking purposeful action in the world. Its staged rest-and-work protocol anticipated Western acceptance-based therapies by decades.
Naikan Cognitive / Behavioral Culturally specific
A Japanese reflective practice organized around three questions: what one has received from others, what one has given back, and what troubles one has caused. Practiced intensively in retreat form, it cultivates gratitude and responsibility and is used in Japanese prisons, hospitals and addiction treatment.
Constructive Living Cognitive / Behavioral Fringe
An American educational method that blends Morita's action focus with Naikan's reflective gratitude practice into a program for purposeful living. It is deliberately positioned as education rather than medical treatment.
Provocative Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Fringe
Farrelly's deliberately outrageous method uses humor, exaggeration and playful devil's-advocacy to provoke clients into defending their own health. It is memorable and influential but has little controlled evidence.
Paradoxical Intention Cognitive / Behavioral Established
Frankl's technique asks the patient to deliberately wish for or exaggerate the feared symptom, breaking the cycle of anticipatory anxiety. It remains a standard tool for insomnia, stuttering and phobic avoidance.
Multimodal Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Established
Lazarus assessed clients across seven modalities summarized as BASIC I.D. (behavior, affect, sensation, imagery, cognition, interpersonal, drugs and biology) and drew techniques from any school that fit. It was an early rigorous model of technical eclecticism.
Constructivist Psychotherapy Cognitive / Behavioral Established
Treats people as active builders of meaning rather than passive processors of information. Therapy explores how a client's personal constructs and life narrative organize experience and how they might be revised.
Fixed-Role Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Historical
Kelly asked clients to live for two weeks as a fictional character written to embody alternative constructs, then debrief. The experiment showed how quickly identity could loosen when treated as a hypothesis.
Nidotherapy Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
A British approach for chronic and severe mental illness that changes the person's environment, the nest, rather than the person. Systematic adjustments to housing, work and relationships are made to fit the individual as they are.
Rumination-Focused CBT Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Targets the habit of repetitive abstract brooding that maintains depression, shifting clients toward concrete, experiential processing. Trials show it helps residual depression and prevents relapse.
Inference-Based CBT (I-CBT) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Treats obsessions as the product of faulty inferential reasoning that leads a person to doubt their senses and imagine what might be true. It works on the doubt itself without requiring exposure.
Danger Ideation Reduction Therapy (DIRT) Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
An Australian cognitive treatment for contamination OCD that reduces exaggerated danger estimates through education, expert testimony and probability work, deliberately without exposure. Small trials report results comparable to ERP.
Bergen 4-Day Treatment Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A concentrated Norwegian format delivering a full course of ERP for OCD in four consecutive days of intensive group and individual work. Long-term outcomes have matched or exceeded standard weekly therapy.
One-Session Treatment (OST) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A single three-hour session of graded exposure, modeling and cognitive challenge for specific phobias. Öst's Swedish trials demonstrated durable cures for spider, needle and other phobias.
Applied Tension Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A technique for blood, injury and injection phobia in which patients tense large muscle groups to counter the drop in blood pressure that causes fainting. It is the standard treatment for this uniquely physiological phobia.
Panic Control Treatment Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Combines education, cognitive work and interoceptive exposure to bodily sensations such as dizziness and a racing heart. Patients learn that the feared sensations are harmless and lose their fear of fear.
Unified Protocol Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A transdiagnostic CBT for the full range of emotional disorders built around emotion awareness, cognitive flexibility, countering avoidance and emotion exposure. It treats anxiety and mood problems with one shared manual.
Process-Based Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
A proposed successor to protocol-based CBT that targets the specific change processes maintaining a given person's problem rather than a diagnosis. It uses network modeling of an individual's symptoms to guide intervention.
Radically Open DBT (RO-DBT) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A DBT variant for overcontrolled disorders such as anorexia, chronic depression and obsessive-compulsive personality. It cultivates openness, flexibility and social signaling rather than emotional restraint.
DBT Prolonged Exposure (DBT-PE) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Integrates a prolonged exposure protocol into standard DBT so that PTSD can be treated in people who also self-harm or are suicidal. Exposure begins once life-threatening behavior is under control.
STEPPS Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Systems Training for Emotional Predictability and Problem Solving is a twenty-week group program for borderline personality disorder that also trains the patient's family and friends. It supplements rather than replaces ongoing treatment.
Good Psychiatric Management (GPM) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A pragmatic, once-weekly generalist treatment for borderline personality disorder built around psychoeducation, case management and a focus on life outside therapy. Trials showed it matched DBT at lower cost.
Emotional Schema Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
Targets beliefs about emotion itself, such as the conviction that feelings are shameful, incomprehensible or endless. Changing these emotional schemas alters how clients respond to their own affect.
Emotion Regulation Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
A treatment for generalized anxiety and comorbid depression that integrates motivational and regulatory skills with mindfulness and experiential exposure. It targets the worry and rumination that mask underlying emotional needs.
Attention Training Technique Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A twelve-minute auditory exercise from metacognitive therapy that trains selective attention, switching and divided attention. It interrupts self-focused rumination and worry.
Cognitive Bias Modification Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
Computerized training that repeatedly nudges attention and interpretation away from threat. Results have been mixed, with laboratory effects often failing to translate into clinical improvement.
Cognitive Remediation Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Structured drill and strategy training to improve attention, memory and executive function in schizophrenia and other conditions. It is usually paired with rehabilitation so gains transfer to daily life.
CBT for Psychosis (CBTp) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Adapts cognitive therapy to delusions and voices by normalizing experiences, examining evidence gently and reducing distress rather than arguing about truth. It is recommended alongside medication in most guidelines.
Positive Psychotherapy (Seligman) Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A fourteen-session program that builds positive emotion, engagement and meaning through exercises such as identifying signature strengths and writing gratitude letters. It complements deficit-focused treatment for depression.
Well-Being Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A brief Italian approach that uses diaries to identify moments of wellbeing and the thoughts that interrupt them, then builds the six dimensions of psychological wellbeing. It reduces relapse in recurrent depression.
Quality of Life Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
Combines positive psychology with CBT to raise satisfaction across sixteen valued life domains. It uses structured assessment to guide where effort will most improve overall happiness.
Hope Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
Grounded in Snyder's theory that hope is the combination of clear goals, pathways to reach them and the agency to pursue them. Brief interventions strengthen each component.
Philosophical Counseling Cognitive / Behavioral Fringe
Founded in Germany in 1981, it addresses life problems through dialogue about worldviews, values and reasoning rather than diagnosis. Practitioners draw on the history of philosophy and rarely claim to treat mental illness.
Logic-Based Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Fringe
A philosophical descendant of REBT that reconstructs a client's emotional reasoning as a syllogism, identifies its faulty premise and offers a philosophical antidote. It is practiced mainly by philosophical counselors.
Stoic Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
Applies ancient Stoic practices, such as distinguishing what is within one's control and the evening review, in a modern cognitive frame. The Stoics were an explicit inspiration for Ellis and Beck.
Socratic Method in Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Established
The disciplined use of open questions to help a client discover the evidence for and against their beliefs. It is the primary conversational tool of cognitive therapy.
Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Fringe
Based on Epstein's dual-process model of a rational system and an intuitive experiential system, therapy uses imagery, fantasy and emotional engagement to reach the experiential mind that logic cannot.
Attributional Retraining Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
Teaches people to attribute setbacks to changeable, specific causes rather than fixed personal defects. Brief versions improve persistence in students and mood in depression.
Thought Stopping Cognitive / Behavioral Historical
A once-standard technique in which an intrusive thought is interrupted with a sharp internal command. Research on thought suppression later showed it tends to increase the frequency of the unwanted thought.
Covert Sensitization Cognitive / Behavioral Historical
An imaginal form of aversion therapy in which a client vividly pairs an unwanted behavior with a disgusting or frightening scene. Part of Cautela's covert-conditioning family, it is rarely used today.
Implosive Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Historical
A form of imaginal flooding in which the therapist narrates exaggerated, psychodynamically themed worst-case scenes until anxiety exhausts itself. It was a bridge between analytic content and behavioral extinction.
Flooding Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Prolonged, intense exposure to the most feared situation without gradual steps, relying on extinction. Effective but demanding, it is used when graded exposure is impractical.
Negative Practice Cognitive / Behavioral Historical
Dunlap's 1928 proposal that deliberately repeating a bad habit under voluntary control could extinguish it. The idea survives in massed-practice treatments for tics and stuttering.
Conditioned Reflex Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Historical
Salter's 1949 system, the first book-length behavior therapy, prescribed excitatory, spontaneous emotional expression to cure inhibitory personalities. It is the origin of assertiveness training.
Integrity Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Historical
Mowrer argued that neurosis comes from real, concealed wrongdoing rather than excessive conscience, and treated it through confession and restitution in small groups. It resembled a secular religious practice.
General Semantics as Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Historical
Korzybski's program for correcting the confusion of words with things, summarized as the map is not the territory. Ellis credited it as a root of REBT and it briefly had its own clinical following.
Rational Therapy (1955) Cognitive / Behavioral Historical
The original form of Ellis's method before it became REBT, introduced in 1955 as an explicit rejection of psychoanalytic passivity. It was the first modern cognitive therapy.
Semantic Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Historical
A general-semantics-based approach to stuttering and adjustment problems that treated misuse of language as the cause of distress. Johnson's work also produced the infamous 1939 Monster Study.
Habit Training (Behavioral Pediatrics) Cognitive / Behavioral Established
Structured routines for sleep, toileting and feeding taught to parents of young children through scheduled cues and reinforcement. It underlies many everyday pediatric interventions.
Overcorrection Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A behavioral consequence in which the person restores the environment beyond its original state or repeatedly practices the correct behavior. It reduces disruptive behavior but requires careful ethical oversight.
Premack Principle Interventions Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Uses a preferred activity as the reward for completing a less preferred one, popularly called Grandma's rule. It is a staple of behavioral parent training and self-management.
Bell-and-Pad Method Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Mowrer's 1938 urine alarm for bedwetting remains the most effective treatment for nocturnal enuresis. It works through conditioning the child to wake to bladder fullness.
Self-Instructional Training Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
Teaches impulsive children and anxious adults to guide their behavior with explicit self-talk, first aloud and then silently. It was a founding technique of cognitive-behavior modification.
Attention Bias Modification Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
Computer tasks that repeatedly draw attention away from threatening faces or words. Evidence is inconsistent, though some versions help social anxiety and PTSD.
Memory Specificity Training Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
Group practice in retrieving specific autobiographical memories to counter the overgeneral recall seen in depression. It is a low-cost intervention with modest support.
Concreteness Training Cognitive / Behavioral Emerging
Trains depressed people to describe upsetting events in concrete, sensory detail rather than abstract judgments about what they mean. It reduces rumination and can be self-administered.
Imagery Rescripting Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
The patient revisits a distressing memory in imagination and then changes its course, bringing in protection, comfort or justice. It is highly effective for PTSD, social anxiety and childhood-trauma-linked personality problems.
Cognitive Behavioral Group Therapy Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
CBT delivered in a structured group so that members practice exposure and cognitive challenge with one another. Heimberg's protocol for social anxiety is the model example.
Humanistic, Existential and Experiential 53 models
Existential Therapy Humanistic Established
Focuses on the given realities of the human condition, helping clients confront anxieties regarding death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom. The ultimate goal is to facilitate authentic living.
Person-Centered Therapy Humanistic Established
Founded by Carl Rogers, this non-directive model assumes the client has an innate actualizing tendency. Healing occurs through the therapist providing unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence.
Gestalt Therapy Humanistic Established
Developed by Fritz Perls, this experiential therapy emphasizes holistic, present-moment awareness. It uses active techniques like the empty chair to integrate fragmented parts of the self and unresolved emotional business.
Logotherapy Humanistic Established
Created by Viktor Frankl, this approach posits that humanity's primary motivational force is the search for meaning. Therapy focuses on finding profound meaning and purpose, even in the midst of extreme suffering.
Humanistic Psychology Humanistic Established
An overarching clinical framework that prioritizes self-actualization, human potential, and the inherent goodness of individuals. It contrasts sharply with the deficit-based models of clinical pathology.
Psychodrama Humanistic Established
Founded by J.L. Moreno, this action-based method involves clients role-playing past, present, or anticipated life events. It fosters catharsis, spontaneity, and rapid insight through physical and theatrical embodiment.
Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) Humanistic Evidence-based
Greenberg's experiential approach treats emotion as the primary organizer of experience and works to access, deepen and transform maladaptive emotional states. Chair dialogues and empathic exploration are central.
Focusing Humanistic Established
Gendlin discovered that clients who improved were those who attended to a vague bodily felt sense of their problem and let words emerge from it. Focusing teaches that skill as a six-step practice.
Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy Humanistic Established
Integrates the felt-sense process into any therapy, with the therapist listening for and reflecting the implicit bodily edge of what the client says. It is a bridge between humanistic and somatic work.
Pre-Therapy Humanistic Emerging
Extends person-centered work to people with psychosis or profound disability who cannot yet make psychological contact. The therapist offers simple contact reflections of the environment, face, body and words.
Existential-Humanistic Therapy Humanistic Established
Bugental's American synthesis of existential themes with humanistic warmth emphasizes presence, the search for authenticity and the client's lived experience in the room. It shaped the training of many depth-oriented therapists.
Existential Analysis (Längle) Humanistic Established
A phenomenological method developed from logotherapy around four fundamental motivations: being able to be, liking life, being oneself and finding meaning. It is widely taught in central Europe.
Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy Humanistic Evidence-based
A brief group or individual therapy for people with advanced cancer that helps them sustain meaning, hope and purpose. It draws on Frankl and has strong trial support in palliative care.
Dignity Therapy Humanistic Evidence-based
A short end-of-life intervention in which a dying person records the memories, values and messages they most want remembered, producing a legacy document for loved ones. It reduces distress and sense of burden.
Transactional Analysis Humanistic Established
Berne's model of Parent, Adult and Child ego states and the games and life scripts people enact between them. Therapy helps clients recognize crossed transactions and choose script-free living.
Redecision Therapy Humanistic Established
Combines transactional analysis with Gestalt techniques so that clients re-experience the childhood scene in which a limiting decision was made and decide differently. It was designed for brief, intensive group work.
Encounter Groups Humanistic Historical
Unstructured intensive groups of the 1960s and 70s in which members were urged toward honest, immediate emotional contact. They produced real growth for some and casualties for others, prompting Yalom's landmark study.
T-Groups (Sensitivity Training) Humanistic Historical
Training groups born at Bethel, Maine in 1947, where participants study their own group process as it unfolds. They spawned organizational development and the encounter movement.
Marathon Group Therapy Humanistic Historical
Continuous sessions lasting a day or more, on the theory that fatigue and sustained contact wear down defenses. A signature of the human potential movement, it is now rarely practiced.
Open Encounter Humanistic Historical
Schutz's Esalen method combined encounter-group honesty with body-oriented exercises and nonverbal contact. It popularized the idea that joy and openness could be taught.
Sensory Awareness Humanistic Historical
A practice of slow, attentive exploration of ordinary sensing, sitting, standing and touching brought from Germany by Selver and taught at Esalen. It quietly influenced Gestalt therapy and mindfulness-based work.
Existential Group Therapy Humanistic Established
Yalom's interpersonal group model uses the here-and-now of member interaction as a social microcosm. His eleven therapeutic factors remain the standard framework for group work.
Impact Therapy Humanistic Fringe
A brief, active approach that uses props, movement, drawings and metaphors to make sessions concrete and memorable. It draws on REBT, TA and Gestalt in a highly directive style.
Motivational Existential Coaching Humanistic Emerging
Van Deurzen's British existential approach maps a client's world across physical, social, personal and spiritual dimensions. It treats crises as invitations to live more deliberately rather than as illness.
Terror Management Health Work Humanistic Emerging
Applies research on how unconscious death anxiety drives defensive behavior to clinical conversations about mortality. It complements existential therapy with an experimental evidence base.
Gestalt Dreamwork Humanistic Established
Rather than interpreting a dream, the dreamer speaks as each of its elements in the present tense. Every image is treated as a disowned part of the self to be reclaimed.
Empty Chair Technique Humanistic Evidence-based
The client addresses an absent person or a part of themselves seated in an empty chair, then switches seats to answer. Research by Greenberg confirmed its power to resolve unfinished business.
Experiential Psychotherapy (Mahrer) Humanistic Fringe
Mahrer's idiosyncratic method has therapist and client sit side by side with eyes closed, entering strong feeling until a deeper experiencing emerges. It aimed at qualitative transformation within a single session.
Process-Experiential Therapy Humanistic Evidence-based
The research name for emotion-focused therapy for individuals, combining Rogerian relationship conditions with Gestalt-derived tasks. It marks emotional events in the session and applies the matching task.
Humanistic Sandtray Humanistic Emerging
A person-centered use of sandtray with adults and adolescents that lets the client create and narrate worlds in miniature without depth interpretation. The therapist witnesses rather than decodes.
Single-Session Therapy Humanistic Emerging
Talmon's research found that many clients attend only once and most feel helped. The approach treats each session as potentially the last and focuses on immediate, usable change.
Possibility Therapy Humanistic Emerging
O'Hanlon's blend of Ericksonian, solution-focused and narrative ideas acknowledges the client's pain while steadily opening possibilities for change. It is deliberately hopeful and collaborative.
Pluralistic Therapy Humanistic Emerging
A British framework holding that different clients need different things and that the client is the best judge. Therapy is built collaboratively from goals, tasks and methods drawn from any tradition.
Feedback-Informed Treatment Humanistic Evidence-based
Uses brief session-by-session measures of outcome and alliance to adjust therapy in real time. Routine feedback reliably improves results and reduces dropout regardless of model.
Common Factors Therapy Humanistic Evidence-based
Rests on the finding that alliance, expectancy, empathy and a credible ritual explain more outcome variance than any specific technique. Clinicians deliberately maximize these shared ingredients.
Motivational Humanistic Psychology (Maslow) Humanistic Historical
Maslow never wrote a therapy manual but his hierarchy of needs and study of peak experiences oriented humanistic clinicians toward growth. Therapy aims to remove obstacles to self-actualization.
Rogerian Encounter (Basic Encounter Group) Humanistic Historical
Rogers's version of the encounter group, emphasizing facilitator genuineness and the group's own capacity for growth. He later used the format in cross-cultural and peace work.
Body-Oriented Gestalt Humanistic Established
Extends Gestalt awareness work explicitly into posture, breath and movement, treating bodily process as an equal partner to speech. It bridges Perls's method and body psychotherapy.
Existential Phenomenological Therapy (Spinelli) Humanistic Established
A rigorously phenomenological British approach that brackets theory to describe the client's worldview as it presents itself. It emphasizes the relational being of therapist and client.
Human Givens Humanistic Fringe
A British model asserting that mental distress arises when innate emotional needs are unmet, treated with education, guided imagery and a rewind technique for trauma. Its evidence base is mostly practitioner-generated.
Rewind Technique Humanistic Fringe
A relaxed, dissociated review of a traumatic event run forward and backward in imagination, used in Human Givens and NLP circles. Small studies are promising but controlled evidence is thin.
Nondirective Play Therapy Humanistic Evidence-based
Axline applied Rogers's conditions to children, letting play unfold without interpretation or direction. It is the root of child-centered play therapy.
Child-Centered Play Therapy Humanistic Evidence-based
Landreth's systematic development of Axline's method, with clear limit-setting and a large body of outcome research. The playroom relationship itself is the agent of change.
Filial Therapy Humanistic Evidence-based
Parents are trained to conduct child-centered play sessions with their own children. Guerney's model and Landreth's ten-week CPRT version have strong evidence.
Creative Journal Therapy Humanistic Established
Uses non-dominant-hand writing and drawing to bypass the critical mind and reach feeling. Capacchione's methods are used in inner-child and recovery work.
Motivational Values Clarification Humanistic Established
A humanistic educational method for helping people identify and prioritize what they actually value. It has been absorbed into ACT and career counseling.
Peak Experience Work Humanistic Fringe
Clinical use of Maslow's peak experiences, moments of awe and unity, as anchors for growth. Clients are helped to recall, integrate and orient toward such moments.
Authentic Happiness Coaching Humanistic Emerging
Structured exercises drawn from positive psychology, such as the three good things practice, delivered in coaching rather than clinical form. It targets flourishing in non-clinical populations.
Motivational Career Construction Humanistic Established
A narrative approach to vocational counseling that helps clients author a life-career story from early recollections and role models. It reframes career choice as identity work.
Reminiscence Therapy Humanistic Evidence-based
Structured recall of past events, often with photographs and music, used mainly with older adults and people with dementia. It improves mood and cognition modestly.
Life Review Therapy Humanistic Evidence-based
Butler's more evaluative form of reminiscence, in which an older person systematically works through the stages of life to reach integrity. It is used in depression and end-of-life care.
Presence-Centered Therapy Humanistic Emerging
Schneider's existential-integrative approach centers the therapist's full presence and the client's capacity for awe. It addresses the polarities of constriction and expansion in a person's life.
Motivational Client-Centered Expressive Work Humanistic Established
Natalie Rogers combined her father's core conditions with art, movement and writing in the Creative Connection process. Expression in one medium is allowed to flow into another.
Systemic, Relational and Attachment 55 models
Family Systems Therapy Systemic Established
Treats the family rather than the individual as the unit of dysfunction, viewing symptoms as products of relational patterns. Change in any member's behavior alters the whole system.
Bowen Family Systems Theory Systemic Established
Bowen's eight interlocking concepts, including differentiation of self, triangles and multigenerational transmission, explain how anxiety moves through families. Therapy coaches individuals to raise their differentiation.
Structural Family Therapy Systemic Evidence-based
Minuchin mapped families in terms of boundaries, subsystems and hierarchies, then actively restructured them in session through enactments. It was highly effective with anorexia and delinquency.
Strategic Family Therapy Systemic Established
Grew from Erickson and the Palo Alto group into a problem-focused method using directives, paradox and ordeals to interrupt the sequences maintaining a symptom. It emphasized power and hierarchy in families.
MRI Brief Therapy Systemic Established
The Mental Research Institute model holds that attempted solutions become the problem. Therapy interrupts the solution cycle in ten sessions or fewer, often with counterintuitive prescriptions.
Milan Systemic Therapy Systemic Established
The Milan team used a therapist and observing colleagues behind a one-way mirror to develop hypotheses, circular questioning and positive connotation of symptoms. It reshaped European family therapy.
Contextual Therapy Systemic Established
Boszormenyi-Nagy introduced relational ethics, the invisible ledger of fairness and loyalty across generations, to family therapy. Healing comes from acknowledging debts and giving what is due.
Symbolic-Experiential Family Therapy Systemic Established
Whitaker's playful, absurd and deeply personal style aimed to unbalance families out of rigid patterns and into spontaneity. He famously refused theory in favor of the therapist's own craziness.
Satir Transformational Systemic Therapy Systemic Established
Satir focused on communication stances, self-esteem and family sculpting, treating families with warmth and touch. Her iceberg metaphor and change model remain widely taught.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy Systemic Evidence-based
Ignores the problem's origins to concentrate on exceptions and preferred futures, using the miracle question and scaling. It is brief, practical and widely used in schools and social services.
Narrative Therapy Systemic Established
Separates the person from the problem through externalizing conversations and re-authors thin, problem-saturated stories into richer preferred narratives. It is rooted in Foucault and social constructionism.
Collaborative Language Systems Systemic Established
A postmodern approach in which the therapist takes a not-knowing stance and problems dissolve through generative conversation. It is the least directive of the systemic therapies.
Reflecting Team Systemic Established
Andersen turned the Milan mirror around: observers share their reflections openly while the family listens, then the family responds. It democratized systemic practice.
Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy Systemic Evidence-based
Applies attachment theory to couples, identifying the pursue-withdraw cycle as the enemy and helping partners express underlying vulnerable needs. It has the strongest outcome evidence of any couple therapy.
Gottman Method Systemic Evidence-based
Built on decades of observational research on what predicts divorce, it teaches couples to manage conflict, build friendship and create shared meaning. The Four Horsemen and repair attempts are core concepts.
Imago Relationship Therapy Systemic Established
Holds that people unconsciously choose partners who resemble their caregivers in order to heal childhood wounds. Structured dialogue teaches mirroring, validation and empathy.
Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy Systemic Evidence-based
Adds emotional acceptance to traditional behavioral couple therapy, helping partners tolerate differences that cannot be changed. It outperformed the older model at five-year follow-up.
PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy) Systemic Emerging
Combines attachment theory, arousal regulation and developmental neuroscience in a highly active, moment-to-moment style. Tatkin's secure-functioning model asks partners to be each other's primary regulators.
Relational Life Therapy Systemic Emerging
Real's confrontational, egalitarian couple therapy names grandiosity and shame directly and challenges patriarchal patterns in intimacy. It moves quickly from insight to changed behavior.
Crucible Approach Systemic Established
Schnarch applied Bowen's differentiation to sex and intimacy, arguing that passion depends on each partner's capacity to hold onto themselves while close. Marriage is treated as a people-growing machine.
Discernment Counseling Systemic Emerging
A brief protocol for mixed-agenda couples in which one wants out and one wants to stay. It helps them choose among staying as is, divorcing, or a six-month commitment to therapy.
Developmental Model of Couples Therapy Systemic Established
Maps couples onto stages parallel to Mahler's infant development, from symbiosis through differentiation to synergy. Therapy helps partners move through stalled stages.
Attachment-Based Family Therapy Systemic Evidence-based
A manualized treatment for depressed and suicidal adolescents that repairs ruptures between teen and parent through structured relational reframing and attachment tasks. It has solid trial evidence.
Family-Based Treatment (Maudsley) Systemic Evidence-based
For adolescent anorexia, parents are put in charge of refeeding before control is gradually returned to the teen. It is the first-line treatment in most guidelines.
Multidimensional Family Therapy Systemic Evidence-based
A comprehensive treatment for adolescent substance use that works simultaneously with the teen, the parents, the family and outside systems. It has strong evidence in juvenile justice populations.
Brief Strategic Family Therapy Systemic Evidence-based
Developed with Cuban American families in Miami, it targets the interactional patterns behind adolescent behavior problems in twelve to sixteen sessions. It is one of the few models validated with Hispanic families.
Functional Family Therapy Systemic Evidence-based
A phased treatment for delinquent adolescents that first reduces blame and builds motivation, then changes behavior, then generalizes gains. It is widely used in juvenile justice.
Multisystemic Therapy Systemic Evidence-based
An intensive home-based program addressing every system around a serious juvenile offender: family, peers, school and neighborhood. Therapists carry small caseloads and are available around the clock.
Circle of Security Systemic Evidence-based
A parenting program that uses a simple graphic of the secure base and safe haven to help caregivers read and respond to their child's attachment needs. Video review of the parent's own interactions is central.
Child-Parent Psychotherapy Systemic Evidence-based
A dyadic treatment for children under six exposed to trauma that works through play with the child and caregiver together. It restores the parent as a source of safety.
Theraplay Systemic Evidence-based
A playful, structured, adult-led method that recreates the nurturing interactions of early parent-infant life to build attachment. It is used with adopted, foster and traumatized children.
Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy Systemic Emerging
Hughes's attachment-focused therapy for children with developmental trauma uses a stance of playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy. It is a mainstream, non-coercive alternative to discredited attachment therapies.
Parent-Child Interaction Therapy Systemic Evidence-based
Parents are coached live through an earpiece while playing with their young child, first to build warmth and then to give effective commands. It has strong evidence for disruptive behavior.
Watch, Wait and Wonder Systemic Emerging
An infant-led psychotherapy in which the parent follows the baby's spontaneous activity and then discusses observations with the therapist. It strengthens maternal sensitivity and attachment.
Video Interaction Guidance Systemic Emerging
Short clips of successful parent-child moments are reviewed with the parent to build on what already works. It is used in the UK and Netherlands for attachment and neglect concerns.
Network Therapy Systemic Historical
Convened a person's entire social network of forty or more people in their home to mobilize collective support during crisis. It anticipated Open Dialogue and family group conferencing.
Multiple Family Therapy Systemic Established
Several families meet together so that they can learn from and support each other. It is now standard in eating-disorder and psychosis services.
Psychogenealogy Systemic Fringe
A French transgenerational approach that uses an expanded genogram to trace how unspoken family secrets and anniversaries repeat across generations. It is popular in France but unproven.
Genogram Work Systemic Established
The systematic three-generation family diagram used to reveal patterns of illness, conflict and loss. McGoldrick's standardized symbols made it a universal assessment tool.
Feminist Family Therapy Systemic Established
Critiques the gender blindness of classical systemic models and attends to power, unpaid labor and violence within families. It changed how the field understands neutrality.
Relational-Cultural Therapy Systemic Established
Developed at the Stone Center, it holds that growth happens through and toward connection rather than separation. Disconnection, especially under conditions of inequality, is the source of suffering.
Attachment-Focused Parenting Work Systemic Established
Clinical work grounded in Bowlby's and Ainsworth's research on secure, avoidant, ambivalent and disorganized attachment. It aims to increase caregiver sensitivity and repair ruptures.
Social Constructionist Therapy Systemic Established
Treats problems as constructed in language and relationship rather than located inside people. It underlies narrative, collaborative and solution-focused practice.
Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) Systemic Evidence-based
Greene's approach to explosive children holds that kids do well if they can, treating outbursts as lagging skills rather than willfulness. Parents and children solve problems together in structured conversations.
Nurtured Heart Approach Systemic Fringe
A parenting method that floods intense children with recognition for what they do right and refuses energy to negative behavior. Widely adopted in schools, it has limited controlled evidence.
Triple P (Positive Parenting Program) Systemic Evidence-based
An Australian tiered public-health parenting system from media messages to intensive family intervention. It has extensive trial data and international dissemination.
Incredible Years Systemic Evidence-based
Video-based group programs for parents, teachers and children that reduce conduct problems and build social competence. It is a model example of evidence-based prevention.
Hold Me Tight Program Systemic Evidence-based
A psychoeducational couples workshop version of emotionally focused therapy built around seven conversations. It lets couples learn the attachment model without individual therapy.
Sex Therapy (Masters and Johnson) Systemic Established
A brief, behavioral couples treatment for sexual dysfunction built on sensate focus and the ban on performance. It founded modern sex therapy.
Sensate Focus Systemic Evidence-based
Graduated touching exercises that remove goal-oriented pressure and rebuild sensual awareness between partners. It is the core technique of most sex therapy.
PLISSIT Model Systemic Established
A tiered framework for sexual concerns: permission, limited information, specific suggestions and intensive therapy. It lets non-specialists address sexuality within their competence.
Ecosystemic Structural Family Therapy Systemic Evidence-based
A Philadelphia development of Minuchin's model that includes the broader community and service system around the family. It is used in home-based services for children with serious emotional disturbance.
Mellow Parenting Systemic Emerging
A Scottish group program for parents with relationship difficulties with their young children that combines video feedback, discussion and shared lunch. It targets attachment in high-need families.
Just Therapy Systemic Culturally specific
Developed at the Family Centre in Wellington, it integrates Māori, Pacific and Pākehā perspectives and treats justice, poverty and colonization as clinical issues. Therapy is accountable to cultural sections of the team.
Family Group Conferencing Systemic Culturally specific
A Māori-derived decision-making process, enshrined in New Zealand law in 1989, in which the extended family makes the plan for a child's care with professionals in a supporting role. It has spread worldwide in child welfare and justice.
Somatic, Neurobiological and Energy 99 models
Somatic Experiencing (SE) Somatic Emerging
Levine's model holds that trauma is incomplete survival energy trapped in the nervous system. Titration and pendulation between distress and resource let that energy discharge in small, tolerable doses.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Somatic Emerging
Integrates body-based interventions with attachment and cognitive work, tracking posture, gesture and impulse to complete defensive responses interrupted during trauma. It is widely trained and increasingly studied.
EMDR Somatic Evidence-based
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing pairs recall of a traumatic memory with bilateral stimulation, allowing the memory to be reconsolidated with less distress. It is recommended for PTSD by the WHO and most national guidelines.
Brainspotting Somatic Emerging
Developed from EMDR, it locates fixed eye positions that correlate with the felt activation of a trauma and holds attention there while the brain processes. Research is early but growing.
Lifespan Integration Somatic Emerging
Repeatedly walks a client through a timeline of memory cues from birth to the present, so that the neural self-system integrates and the body learns that the trauma is over. It is gentle and requires little verbal processing.
Neurofeedback (EEG Biofeedback) Somatic Emerging
Trains the brain to shift its own electrical activity by rewarding target frequencies in real time. Evidence is strongest for ADHD and epilepsy and mixed elsewhere; protocols vary widely.
qEEG Brain Mapping Somatic Emerging
Quantitative EEG compares a person's brainwave patterns against a normative database to guide neurofeedback and other interventions. It is an assessment tool rather than a treatment in itself.
Polyvagal-Informed Therapy Somatic Emerging
Uses Porges's model of a hierarchical autonomic nervous system to help clients map states of safety, mobilization and shutdown. The theory's neuroanatomy is contested but the clinical framework is widely adopted.
Safe and Sound Protocol Somatic Emerging
A five-hour listening program of filtered music designed to stimulate the middle-ear muscles and shift the nervous system toward social engagement. Evidence comes mostly from small studies.
Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) Somatic Emerging
Guides attention to the brainstem-level orienting tension and shock that precede emotion in the trauma sequence. An early randomized controlled trial reported results comparable to established treatments, though the evidence base remains small.
Flash Technique Somatic Emerging
A low-intensity EMDR variant in which the client holds a positive engaging focus while briefly blinking rather than concentrating on the trauma. It reduces distress rapidly and with little exposure.
Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) Somatic Emerging
Combines eye movements with voluntary image replacement so that the client rescripts the sensory details of a traumatic memory in a few sessions. Studies in veterans are promising.
Observed and Experiential Integration (OEI) Somatic Fringe
A Canadian method that has the client watch one eye at a time and switch between them to identify and clear glitches in visual processing tied to trauma. It has a small practitioner base and little evidence.
Eye Movement Integration Somatic Fringe
An NLP-derived technique that guides the eyes through set patterns while a person holds a distressing memory. It predates EMDR's popularity but never gained a research base.
Comprehensive Resource Model Somatic Fringe
Builds layered internal resources, from breath and attachment figures to spiritual and animal allies, before touching traumatic material. It borrows from EMDR, ego-state and shamanic ideas.
Havening Techniques Somatic Fringe
Uses soothing touch to the arms, face and palms paired with distraction to purportedly de-link traumatic memories from their emotional charge. The proposed mechanism is speculative and independent evidence is limited.
Thought Field Therapy (TFT) Somatic Pseudoscientific
Claims that tapping acupuncture points in specific sequences clears perturbations in invisible thought fields to relieve phobias and trauma. The American Psychological Association has stated it lacks a scientific basis and it is widely classified as pseudoscience.
Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT Tapping) Somatic Fringe
A simplified offshoot of TFT combining fingertip tapping on meridian points with spoken acceptance statements. Some trials report benefit, but reviewers attribute effects to exposure and relaxation rather than any energy mechanism.
Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT) Somatic Pseudoscientific
A pose in which fingers are held to points around the eyes and the back of the head while the person moves through a series of statements about a problem. It rests on energy-meridian claims without supporting evidence.
Advanced Integrative Therapy Somatic Pseudoscientific
Formerly Seemorg Matrix Work, it claims to clear trauma energy from a sequence of chakras by hand placement while the client repeats statements. It has no independent evidence.
Be Set Free Fast Somatic Pseudoscientific
An energy-psychology method in which the subconscious is instructed to eliminate a problem when a cue word is spoken. It is a fringe practice without research support.
Matrix Reimprinting Somatic Pseudoscientific
Extends EFT tapping with the idea that younger selves are frozen in a morphic field and can be visited and rewritten. It blends tapping with popular quantum metaphors.
Energy Psychology Somatic Fringe
An umbrella term for methods that combine psychological exposure with stimulation of acupuncture points or purported energy fields. Proponents cite growing trials; critics note that the energy explanation is unfalsifiable.
Logosynthesis Somatic Pseudoscientific
A Swiss method that uses three fixed sentences to retrieve and dissolve frozen life energy attached to memories. It is popular in coaching circles and untested.
PSYCH-K Somatic Pseudoscientific
Claims to rewrite subconscious beliefs through muscle testing and whole-brain postures. Endorsed in popular epigenetics books, it has no credible evidence.
Emotion Code and Body Code Somatic Pseudoscientific
A chiropractor-devised system that uses muscle testing and a magnet swept along the spine to release supposedly trapped emotions inherited from ancestors. It is pseudoscientific.
BodyTalk Somatic Pseudoscientific
A tapping-on-the-head protocol guided by muscle testing that claims to restore communication among body systems. It has no plausible mechanism or evidence.
ThetaHealing Somatic Pseudoscientific
Claims that practitioners in a theta brainwave state can command the Creator to heal disease and change beliefs. It is marketed widely and has drawn regulatory criticism.
Access Bars Somatic Pseudoscientific
Light touching of thirty-two points on the head said to release stored thoughts and limitations. It belongs to the Access Consciousness organization and lacks evidence.
Reiki as Adjunct Somatic Pseudoscientific
A Japanese laying-on-of-hands practice claiming to channel universal life energy. Controlled studies find effects indistinguishable from sham; it is offered in some hospitals as comfort care.
Therapeutic Touch and Healing Touch Somatic Pseudoscientific
Nurse-developed practices of moving the hands over a patient's energy field. A famous 1998 study by a nine-year-old showed practitioners could not detect the field they claimed to treat.
Applied Kinesiology and Three-in-One Concepts Somatic Pseudoscientific
Uses muscle-strength testing to diagnose emotional and physical problems and to select corrections. Blinded studies show the test performs no better than chance.
Neuro Emotional Technique Somatic Pseudoscientific
A chiropractic method combining muscle testing, meridian theory and spinal adjustment to clear neuro-emotional complexes. Its diagnostic claims have no scientific support.
Bioenergetic Analysis Somatic Fringe
Lowen developed Reich's ideas into a system of stress postures, grounding and expressive exercises that release chronic muscular armor. It has an international training body but modest research.
Core Energetics Somatic Fringe
Pierrakos combined bioenergetics with his wife Eva's spiritual Pathwork lectures, adding meditation and the concept of a luminous core self. It is practiced as a body-spiritual psychotherapy.
Radix Somatic Fringe
A neo-Reichian educational method for releasing blocks to feeling and vision, named for the root life force. Kelley framed it as growth work rather than therapy.
Biosynthesis Somatic Fringe
Boadella's integration of Reichian bodywork with embryology and prenatal psychology, working with grounding, centering and facing. It was among the first body psychotherapies recognized by the European association.
Biodynamic Psychology Somatic Fringe
A Norwegian physiotherapist's system that uses massage and a stethoscope on the abdomen to track psychoperistalsis, the gut's digestion of stress. It treats bodily self-regulation as the path to psychological health.
Formative Psychology Somatic Fringe
Keleman taught that the body's shape embodies its emotional history and can be reformed voluntarily through a five-step practice of intensifying and then disorganizing habitual postures.
Bodynamic Analysis Somatic Fringe
A Danish system mapping specific muscles to developmental stages and psychological functions. Therapists assess hypo- and hyper-responsive muscles to reach the corresponding childhood period.
Postural Integration Somatic Fringe
Combines deep tissue work in the Rolfing lineage with Gestalt and Reichian breathing and emotional release. It is taught mostly in Europe.
Integrative Body Psychotherapy Somatic Fringe
Rosenberg's synthesis of Reichian breathing, Gestalt, object relations and transpersonal work organized around the concept of a core self. It emphasizes boundaries and the somatic sense of self.
Somatic Trauma Therapy Somatic Emerging
Rothschild's cautious, brakes-before-accelerator approach to trauma emphasizes stabilization, dual awareness and the somatic markers of arousal. Her books shaped a generation of trauma clinicians.
NARM (NeuroAffective Relational Model) Somatic Emerging
Targets developmental and attachment trauma by tracking five adaptive survival styles and working in the present with identity and self-regulation. It deliberately avoids regressive cathartic techniques.
Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor Somatic Fringe
In structures lasting about an hour, group members enact ideal parents who supply the care the client lacked, creating new symbolic memories. It has a devoted following in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Hakomi Somatic Fringe
A mindfulness-centered body psychotherapy that uses gentle probes and experiments in the present moment to surface core organizing beliefs. It is grounded in Buddhist and Taoist principles.
Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) Somatic Fringe
A series of stretches that trigger neurogenic tremoring, proposed to discharge stored stress. It is simple and self-administered but has minimal controlled evidence.
Rubenfeld Synergy Somatic Fringe
Combines gentle touch drawn from Alexander and Feldenkrais with talk and Gestalt work. Rubenfeld coined the phrase that the body tells the truth.
Rosen Method Somatic Fringe
A German-born physiotherapist's method of gentle touch and words that meets chronic muscle holding and allows suppressed feelings to surface. It is bodywork with psychotherapeutic aims.
Feldenkrais Method Somatic Fringe
Slow, exploratory movement lessons that refine the nervous system's control of action. It is an educational method rather than psychotherapy but is used widely for embodiment and pain.
Alexander Technique Somatic Established
Teaches inhibition of habitual postural reactions, especially in the head-neck relationship. Trials support it for back pain, and it is used adjunctively for anxiety and performance.
Rolfing Structural Integration Somatic Fringe
Ten sessions of deep manipulation of fascia intended to align the body in gravity. Rolf's followers extended it into emotional release work with little research.
Trager Approach Somatic Fringe
Gentle rhythmic rocking and movement lessons meant to reach the unconscious and release deep holding. It is a movement-education adjunct with anecdotal support.
Continuum Movement Somatic Fringe
Uses breath, sound and fluid micro-movements to reconnect with the body's primordial water nature. It is practiced as somatic inquiry rather than treatment.
Body-Mind Centering Somatic Fringe
An experiential study of embodying each body system, from cells to organs to fluids, through touch and movement. It informs dance therapy and developmental movement work.
Authentic Movement Somatic Fringe
A mover with eyes closed follows inner impulse while a witness watches without judgment, then both speak. It is a Jungian-influenced form of active imagination in movement.
5Rhythms Somatic Fringe
A movement meditation that cycles through flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness. Roth framed it as a path to freedom rather than clinical treatment.
Biodanza Somatic Fringe
A Chilean system of music, movement and group encounter designed to stimulate vitality, affectivity and transcendence. It is popular in Latin America and Europe.
Middendorf Breathwork Somatic Fringe
A German practice of allowing the breath to come and go on its own while sensing its movement through the body. It aims at an experienceable breath that informs self-perception.
Eutony Somatic Fringe
A Danish-German somatic education using contact with objects and inner sensing to achieve balanced tonus. It is taught for pain, tension and body awareness.
Concentrative Movement Therapy Somatic Established
A German inpatient body psychotherapy in which patients explore perception and movement tasks and then discuss the psychodynamic material that arises. It is well established in German psychosomatic clinics.
Functional Relaxation Somatic Established
A German method of subtle movements on the outbreath that aims to restore rhythmic self-regulation, used for asthma, functional syndromes and anxiety. It is recognized in German psychosomatic medicine.
Basic Body Awareness Therapy Somatic Evidence-based
A Scandinavian physiotherapy approach built on the movement teachings of Jacques Dropsy, addressing posture, breathing and mindful movement. It has trials in depression, pain and eating disorders.
Norwegian Psychomotor Physiotherapy Somatic Established
A physiotherapy tradition treating muscular holding and restricted breathing as expressions of emotional defense. It has been publicly funded in Norway for decades.
Haptonomy Somatic Fringe
A Dutch science of affective touch used prenatally to establish contact with the unborn child and in care of the ill. It is widespread in France and the Netherlands.
Sophrology Somatic Fringe
A Spanish neuropsychiatrist's blend of hypnosis, yoga, Zen and relaxation into a graded training of consciousness. It is mainstream in France and Switzerland for stress and childbirth.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation Somatic Evidence-based
Jacobson's systematic tensing and releasing of muscle groups to learn the feeling of relaxation. It remains a first-line skill for anxiety and insomnia.
Biofeedback Somatic Evidence-based
Real-time display of heart rate, skin conductance, muscle tension or temperature lets a person learn voluntary control of physiology. It is effective for headache, incontinence and anxiety.
Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback Somatic Evidence-based
Trains slow resonance-frequency breathing to maximize heart rhythm variability, improving autonomic balance. HeartMath is a commercialized variant with additional unproven claims.
Alpha-Theta Neurofeedback Somatic Emerging
A protocol that rewards deep alpha and theta states, first used with alcoholic veterans and later with PTSD. The Peniston protocol produced dramatic early results that later studies only partly replicated.
LENS Neurofeedback Somatic Fringe
Low Energy Neurofeedback delivers tiny electromagnetic signals mirroring the person's own brainwaves, requiring no effort. Practitioners report rapid results but the research is preliminary.
Audio-Visual Entrainment Somatic Fringe
Flashing lights and pulsing tones intended to drive the brain toward target frequencies. Evidence is limited and the devices are marketed mostly for relaxation.
Cranial Electrotherapy Stimulation Somatic Fringe
Earclip devices deliver microcurrent for anxiety, insomnia and depression. The FDA classifies them as devices, but reviews judge the evidence weak.
Craniosacral Therapy and SomatoEmotional Release Somatic Pseudoscientific
Light-touch manipulation of the skull said to influence cerebrospinal fluid rhythm and release stored emotion. The proposed rhythm cannot be reliably detected and the therapy is regarded as pseudoscience.
Tomatis Method Somatic Pseudoscientific
Listening to filtered Mozart and Gregorian chant through a special device to retrain the ear and, supposedly, treat dyslexia, autism and depression. Systematic reviews find no benefit.
Sound Healing and Vibroacoustic Therapy Somatic Fringe
Singing bowls, gongs and low-frequency vibration beds used for relaxation and, in stronger claims, cellular healing. Relaxation effects are real; the rest is unsupported.
Flotation-REST Somatic Emerging
Floating in a dark, silent tank of body-temperature salt water, originally an isolation experiment and now studied for anxiety. Trials by Feinstein show large short-term reductions in anxiety.
Cold Exposure and Wim Hof Method Somatic Fringe
Combines hyperventilation-style breathing with cold immersion and meditation, claimed to control immunity and mood. Some physiological findings are real; the breathing has caused drownings when done in water.
Conscious Connected Breathwork Somatic Fringe
Continuous circular breathing without pauses, used in rebirthing and its descendants to induce altered states and emotional release. It can produce tetany and dissociation and should be supervised.
Yoga Therapy Somatic Emerging
Adapts postures, breath and meditation to specific clinical conditions under an accredited framework. Evidence is solid for depression, anxiety and low back pain.
Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Somatic Evidence-based
Developed at the Trauma Center in Boston, it offers invitational language, choice and no hands-on adjustment so survivors can safely reinhabit their bodies. A randomized trial found it reduced PTSD in chronically traumatized women.
Tai Chi and Qigong Therapy Somatic Evidence-based
Slow meditative movement forms from China with good evidence for balance, mood and anxiety in older adults. Medical qigong's claims of energy healing go beyond the evidence.
Martial Arts and Boxing Therapy Somatic Emerging
Uses structured training in boxing, aikido or other arts to build regulation, confidence and embodied assertiveness in youth and trauma survivors. Small programs report benefit.
Somatic Coaching (Strozzi) Somatic Fringe
Blends aikido, bodywork and leadership coaching to shape a person's embodied way of being under pressure. It is used in organizations more than clinics.
Walk-and-Talk Therapy Somatic Emerging
Conducting sessions while walking outdoors, combining exercise, side-by-side positioning and nature exposure. It is increasingly common though research is limited.
Exercise as Treatment Somatic Evidence-based
Prescribed aerobic or resistance exercise has effects on mild to moderate depression comparable to medication in meta-analyses. It is now a guideline-recommended intervention.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy Somatic Emerging
Treats chronic primary pain as a learned, reversible brain prediction, using education, somatic tracking and reappraisal of sensations as safe. In a 2021 randomized trial, two-thirds of participants were pain-free or nearly so after four weeks.
Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy Somatic Emerging
Helps people with centralized pain identify, express and resolve avoided emotions and conflicts. It outperformed CBT in trials and is cited in U.S. federal pain guidelines.
Tension Myoneural Syndrome Approach Somatic Fringe
Sarno's contention that most chronic back pain is a distraction from repressed rage, treated with education and journaling. Never tested rigorously by him, it inspired the evidence-based PRT and EAET.
Lightning Process Somatic Fringe
A three-day training blending NLP, osteopathy and life coaching sold for chronic fatigue and other conditions. A UK trial in adolescents reported benefit but was heavily criticized, and the method has drawn regulatory complaints.
Gupta Program and DNRS Somatic Fringe
Brain-retraining programs claiming that chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and chemical sensitivity arise from a stuck limbic threat loop that visualization can reset. Trials are sponsor-run and small.
Reverse Therapy and Mickel Therapy Somatic Fringe
British programs that treat fatigue syndromes as messages from the hypothalamus about unmet needs. They are practitioner-based and unstudied.
Gut-Directed Hypnotherapy Somatic Evidence-based
A twelve-session Manchester protocol of hypnotic suggestion targeting bowel function for irritable bowel syndrome. It has consistent trial support and NICE recognition.
Tinnitus Retraining Therapy Somatic Emerging
Combines counseling with low-level sound to habituate the brain's reaction to tinnitus. Trials show it helps distress though not the sound itself.
Interoceptive Exposure Somatic Evidence-based
Deliberately inducing feared bodily sensations, such as spinning or breathing through a straw, until they lose their threat. It is a core panic-disorder technique.
Emotional Transformation Therapy (ETT) Somatic Fringe
Uses colored light and eye movement to shift emotional states rapidly, on the theory that specific wavelengths access specific neural circuits. It has a practitioner following but almost no controlled research.
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) Somatic Emerging
Pairs sub-anesthetic ketamine with preparation and integration sessions to open a window for processing trauma and treatment-resistant depression. The drug's effect is well documented; the added value of the psychotherapy wrapper is still being tested.
Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics Somatic Emerging
Perry's developmental framework sequences interventions to match the brain regions affected by early trauma, starting with regulation before relating and reasoning. It guides program design more than individual technique.
Trauma Resiliency Model Somatic Emerging
Teaches a small set of wellness skills, such as tracking, resourcing and grounding, to widen the resilient zone of the nervous system. Its community version has been deployed after disasters worldwide.
Expressive, Transpersonal and Integrative 53 models
Art Therapy Expressive Evidence-based
Uses drawing, painting and sculpture as the primary language of therapy, whether the image is interpreted psychodynamically (Naumburg) or valued as healing in itself (Kramer). It is a licensed profession with a broad evidence base.
Music Therapy Expressive Evidence-based
A credentialed profession using listening, songwriting, improvisation and performance to address emotional, cognitive and social needs. Evidence is strong in dementia, autism and depression.
Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Expressive Evidence-based
A creative, improvisational approach in which therapist and client make music together, on the premise that everyone has an inner music child. It was developed with disabled children in the 1960s.
Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music Expressive Established
Classical music programs guide a client in a relaxed state through spontaneous imagery which is then processed. Bonny developed it during the Maryland psychedelic research program.
Analytical Music Therapy Expressive Established
Improvised music is used to explore unconscious material, with the therapist playing alongside the client and interpreting psychoanalytically. It was developed in London in the 1970s.
Vocal Psychotherapy Expressive Emerging
Uses the breath, natural sounds and vocal holding techniques to access preverbal feeling and rebuild a sense of self. Austin developed it for adults with developmental trauma.
Neurologic Music Therapy Expressive Evidence-based
Applies rhythmic and melodic cueing to motor, speech and cognitive rehabilitation after stroke and in Parkinson's disease. It is grounded in neuroscience rather than psychodynamics.
Dance/Movement Therapy Expressive Evidence-based
Uses movement as the medium of assessment and change, reading posture and gesture as expressions of inner life. Chace founded the field on psychiatric wards in the 1940s.
Drama Therapy Expressive Evidence-based
Employs role-play, improvisation, story and performance to rehearse change at a safe distance. Landy's role method and Emunah's five-phase model are the leading frameworks.
Developmental Transformations Expressive Emerging
A form of drama therapy in which therapist and client improvise continuously in a playspace, with the therapist as a full player. It is used with veterans and trauma survivors.
Playback Theatre Expressive Established
Audience members tell personal stories that a trained company immediately enacts. Fox designed it as community ritual, and it is used therapeutically in trauma and conflict settings.
Theatre of the Oppressed Expressive Established
Boal's forum and image theatre let spectators step in and change the outcome of scenes of oppression. His later Rainbow of Desire adapted it for internalized oppression and therapy.
Sociodrama Expressive Established
Moreno's group method for enacting collective roles and social conflicts rather than personal biography. It is used in organizations, schools and reconciliation work.
Sociometry Expressive Established
Moreno's measurement of the attractions and repulsions within a group, mapped as a sociogram. It underlies psychodrama's warm-up and group therapy's understanding of subgroups.
Axiodrama Expressive Historical
Moreno's earliest and least-known form of enactment, dramatizing a person's relationship to values, ethics and the sacred. It has been revived by some psychodramatists.
Poetry Therapy Expressive Established
Reading and writing poems to name, contain and transform emotion, formalized by Leedy in the 1960s. Mazza's model distinguishes receptive, expressive and symbolic components.
Bibliotherapy Expressive Evidence-based
Prescribed reading, from self-help manuals to fiction, as treatment or adjunct. Guided CBT bibliotherapy has strong evidence for mild depression and anxiety.
Expressive Writing Expressive Evidence-based
Pennebaker's protocol of writing about one's deepest feelings around an upheaval for twenty minutes on several days. Dozens of studies show modest gains in health and mood.
Journal Therapy Expressive Established
Structured reflective writing techniques, from lists and sprints to unsent letters, used deliberately for healing. Adams founded the Center for Journal Therapy in 1985.
Cinematherapy Expressive Fringe
Prescribing films whose stories mirror a client's situation to prompt insight and discussion. It is popular but has little formal research.
Phototherapy and Photovoice Expressive Emerging
Uses personal photographs as catalysts for memory and feeling in session, or, in photovoice, gives community members cameras to document their lives for advocacy. Both are widely used in community and narrative work.
Sandtray Therapy Expressive Evidence-based
A cross-theoretical use of miniatures in sand distinct from Jungian sandplay, usable within CBT, Adlerian or family frames. It is a standard play-therapy modality.
Mutual Storytelling Expressive Historical
The child tells a story and the therapist retells it with a healthier resolution. Gardner's technique remains in use despite his later discredited theories about custody.
Fairy-Tale Therapy (Skazkoterapiya) Expressive Culturally specific
A Russian school that uses traditional and composed tales, puppets and sand to work with children and adults. It has its own institute in St. Petersburg and is little known in the West.
Mask Work Expressive Established
Making and wearing masks to give form to hidden or emerging aspects of self, drawn from drama therapy and Jungian practice. It offers distance that makes difficult material speakable.
Puppetry in Therapy Expressive Established
Puppets let children and adults project feelings onto a figure that can say the unsayable. It is a standard technique in play and family therapy.
Body Mapping Expressive Emerging
Life-size tracings of the body filled with images and words about illness, trauma and identity, developed with women living with HIV in South Africa. It is used in narrative and community health work.
Labyrinth Walking Expressive Fringe
Walking a single-path labyrinth as a contemplative practice for grief, decision and prayer. Hospitals and retreat centers offer it; evidence is anecdotal.
Horticultural Therapy Expressive Evidence-based
Gardening and plant care led by a trained therapist for rehabilitation, dementia and mental health. Reviews find consistent moderate benefits for mood and function.
Care Farming Expressive Emerging
Working farms in the Netherlands, Norway and the UK that host people with mental illness, addiction or dementia for structured daily activity. It combines occupation, nature and community.
Wilderness Therapy Expressive Emerging
Extended backcountry expeditions combined with therapy for adolescents, descended from Outward Bound. Outcomes are positive in program data, but the industry has faced serious abuse and safety scandals.
Adventure Therapy Expressive Evidence-based
Ropes courses, climbing and group challenges used to build trust, problem solving and self-efficacy. Meta-analyses show moderate effects in youth.
Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy Expressive Emerging
Ground-based work with horses, whose sensitivity to human arousal gives immediate feedback about emotional state. EAGALA and PATH set the main standards; evidence is promising but uneven.
Animal-Assisted Therapy Expressive Evidence-based
Levinson discovered in the 1960s that his dog Jingles helped withdrawn children engage. Dogs and other animals are now used to reduce anxiety and build rapport across settings.
Dolphin-Assisted Therapy Expressive Pseudoscientific
Swimming with captive dolphins marketed to families of children with autism and disabilities. Reviews find no evidence beyond novelty and raise animal welfare concerns.
Surf and Ocean Therapy Expressive Emerging
Structured surfing programs for veterans, youth and people with disabilities that combine exercise, nature and mentoring. Early studies show reductions in PTSD and depression symptoms.
Forest Bathing (Shinrin-yoku) Expressive Emerging
A Japanese practice of slow, sensory immersion in forest air. Studies document reductions in cortisol and blood pressure, with health-ministry support in Japan.
Ecopsychology and Ecotherapy Expressive Emerging
Holds that disconnection from the natural world is itself a source of psychological suffering. Ecotherapy prescribes nature contact and, increasingly, addresses climate grief.
Climate-Aware Therapy Expressive Emerging
Clinical work that treats eco-anxiety and climate grief as reasonable responses rather than pathology and helps clients move toward agency. The Climate Psychology Alliance sets its emerging standards.
Transpersonal Psychology Expressive Established
The fourth force in psychology, extending beyond the individual ego to encompass spiritual, transcendent, and mystical experiences. It views transpersonal growth as a fundamental component of holistic mental health.
Integral Psychotherapy Expressive Fringe
Applies Wilber's four-quadrant, all-levels map to therapy, matching intervention to a client's developmental stage and state. It is a meta-framework more than a technique.
Diamond Approach Expressive Fringe
Almaas's synthesis of object relations, Gurdjieff and Sufi ideas in which essential qualities such as strength and compassion are recovered through inquiry. It is taught as a spiritual path with psychological method.
Holotropic Breathwork Expressive Fringe
Accelerated breathing, evocative music and bodywork induce non-ordinary states the Grofs framed as intrinsically healing, created as a legal successor to LSD psychotherapy. Hyperventilation carries real risks and controlled evidence is minimal.
Integrative Psychotherapy Expressive Established
The deliberate combination of approaches through common factors, technical eclecticism, theoretical integration or assimilation. Most practicing therapists now describe themselves this way.
Technical Eclecticism Expressive Established
Selects techniques from any school on empirical grounds without adopting their theories. Lazarus argued that theoretical purity was less important than what worked for a given person.
Assimilative Integration Expressive Established
Keeps one home theory while importing techniques from others and letting them change the home base over time. It describes how most psychodynamic clinicians actually integrate CBT.
Unified Psychotherapy Expressive Emerging
Magnavita's attempt to organize all therapy around a single map of the personality system across intrapsychic, dyadic, family and cultural domains. It aims to end school rivalry.
Contextual Model of Psychotherapy Expressive Evidence-based
Wampold's meta-analytic argument that therapy works through a real relationship, expectation created by explanation and the enactment of health-promoting actions. It challenges the medical model of specific ingredients.
Deliberate Practice in Psychotherapy Expressive Emerging
Applies expertise research to therapist training by drilling specific micro-skills with feedback outside sessions. It is reshaping how competence is developed.
Psycho-Cybernetics Expressive Historical
A plastic surgeon's 1960 self-image program using visualization and relaxation, based on feedback control metaphors. It sold millions and shaped sports psychology and coaching.
Silva Method Expressive Pseudoscientific
A 1960s training claiming to teach alpha-state mind control, remote diagnosis and problem solving. Its parapsychological claims have no support.
Music-Assisted Relaxation Expressive Evidence-based
Receptive listening to selected music to reduce anxiety before surgery, in intensive care and during chemotherapy. It is among the best-supported music interventions.
Intermodal Expressive Arts Therapy Expressive Established
Moves fluidly between art forms within a session, letting a drawing become a movement become a poem. Knill's decentering and low skill/high sensitivity principles guide the work.
Spiritual, Religious and Indigenous 69 models
Eastern Orthodox Psychotherapy Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A framework that views psychopathology as a spiritual disease of the soul, specifically the nous. It uses ascetic practices and theological interventions for profound spiritual healing.
Hagiotherapy Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A medically oriented spiritual therapy focusing on healing the spiritual soul. It aims to alleviate existential suffering by repairing the client's relationship with transcendent values.
Pastoral Counseling Spiritual / Indigenous Established
Clergy-provided counseling that integrates theological resources with psychological method, professionalized in the United States after 1950. It ranges from congregational care to licensed clinical practice.
Spiritual Direction Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
An ancient Christian practice of accompanied discernment about one's relationship with God, now also offered in interfaith forms. It is not therapy but often runs alongside it.
Ignatian Discernment Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
The Jesuit method of noticing consolation and desolation to guide life decisions, structured in the Spiritual Exercises. Clinicians of faith draw on it for values and decision work.
Centering Prayer Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A Christian contemplative practice of silently consenting to God's presence, developed by Trappist monks in the 1970s. Keating explicitly described it as divine therapy for unconscious wounds.
Nouthetic and Biblical Counseling Spiritual / Indigenous Fringe
Adams's 1970 movement rejected secular psychology in favor of confrontation with Scripture, viewing most problems as sin. The later biblical counseling movement led by CCEF softened its tone while keeping its theology.
Christian Psychology Spiritual / Indigenous Established
Seeks to build a psychology from Christian sources such as Augustine and Kierkegaard rather than baptizing secular models. It occupies a middle ground between integration and biblical counseling.
Theophostic Prayer (Transformation Prayer Ministry) Spiritual / Indigenous Fringe
Guides a person to a memory holding a lie and invites Jesus to reveal truth, with the expectation of instant release. It is a lay practice with a small, mixed research literature and concerns about memory suggestibility.
Immanuel Approach Spiritual / Indigenous Fringe
A Christian psychiatrist's method of establishing a felt sense of Jesus's presence before working through traumatic memories. It borrows from attachment theory and Wilder's Life Model.
Sozo Spiritual / Indigenous Fringe
An inner-healing and deliverance ministry from Bethel Church in Redding, California that uses guided prayer tools such as the Father Ladder. Critics inside and outside the church have raised concerns about pressure and false memory.
Inner Healing and Healing of Memories Spiritual / Indigenous Fringe
Charismatic prayer practices from the 1950s onward that invite Christ into painful memories to heal them. The Linns adapted Kübler-Ross's stages of grief to forgiveness work.
Clinical Theology Spiritual / Indigenous Historical
A British Anglican psychiatrist's synthesis of object relations, LSD-facilitated birth-trauma recall and Christian theology, taught to thousands of clergy from 1958. It later evolved into primal integration.
Emmanuel Movement Spiritual / Indigenous Historical
A Boston Episcopal church program from 1906 that combined medical screening, moral instruction and group classes for nervous disorders and alcoholism. It was a direct precursor of Alcoholics Anonymous and group therapy.
Twelve-Step Programs Spiritual / Indigenous Evidence-based
Mutual-aid fellowships built on admitting powerlessness, moral inventory, amends and service, originating with Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. Their spiritual frame is broad and outcome research supports sustained participation.
Twelve-Step Facilitation Spiritual / Indigenous Evidence-based
A manualized individual therapy that encourages and supports active engagement in AA or NA. In Project MATCH it performed as well as CBT and motivational enhancement.
Mussar Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A Jewish practice of cultivating character traits such as humility and patience through study, journaling and small daily exercises. It has been revived as a form of spiritual self-work.
Hasidic and Torah-Based Counseling Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Counseling that draws on rabbinic teaching, prayer and the structure of religious life, offered by Orthodox practitioners. Organizations such as Nefesh integrate it with licensed practice.
Islamic Psychology (TIIP) Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Traditionally Islamically Integrated Psychotherapy draws on classical accounts of the soul, heart and intellect to frame assessment and intervention for Muslim clients. It is taught through Khalil Center and related programs.
Al-Balkhi's Sustenance of the Soul Spiritual / Indigenous Historical
A ninth-century Persian text that described obsessions, phobias and depression and prescribed reciprocal inhibition and rational counter-thoughts. It is often cited as the earliest cognitive therapy.
Sufi Psychology Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Maps the soul's stations and the disciplines of remembrance and companionship as a path from the commanding self to the self at peace. Nurbakhsh, a psychiatrist and Nimatullahi master, wrote it into clinical language.
Contemplative Psychotherapy (Naropa) Spiritual / Indigenous Established
Naropa University's program grounds clinical training in Buddhist meditation and the view that basic sanity underlies confusion. Therapists sit with clients from a stance of brilliant sanity.
Core Process Psychotherapy Spiritual / Indigenous Fringe
A British Buddhist-informed body psychotherapy developed at the Karuna Institute, centered on the joint mindful inquiry of therapist and client. It integrates object relations and craniosacral sensibility.
Buddhist Psychotherapy Spiritual / Indigenous Established
Epstein's writing brought the Buddhist analysis of craving, impermanence and no-self into psychoanalytic practice. Meditation and analysis are treated as complementary paths through suffering.
Loving-Kindness and Tonglen Interventions Spiritual / Indigenous Evidence-based
Structured compassion meditations, whether Theravada metta or Tibetan tonglen, adapted into clinical protocols. Trials show benefits for self-criticism, depression and PTSD.
Vipassana as Intervention Spiritual / Indigenous Emerging
Ten-day silent insight-meditation courses offered in prisons and addiction settings. Studies of the Goenka program report reduced substance use and recidivism.
Transcendental Meditation Spiritual / Indigenous Fringe
A mantra technique taught by a hierarchical organization and promoted with strong health claims. Independent reviews find benefits similar to other relaxation methods and criticize the quality of movement-funded research.
Yoga Nidra Spiritual / Indigenous Emerging
A guided rotation of awareness through the body toward a state between waking and sleep, adapted as iRest for veterans. Small trials support it for insomnia and stress.
Sattvavajaya Chikitsa (Ayurvedic Psychotherapy) Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
The Ayurvedic branch of mind-control therapy that restrains the mind from unwholesome objects through knowledge, reasoning, courage and memory. It is the classical Indian analogue of psychotherapy.
Guru-Chela Relationship Model Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Indian psychiatrist Neki proposed in 1973 that the culturally familiar guru-disciple bond, not Western neutrality, is the appropriate therapeutic relationship in South Asia. It remains a touchstone of cross-cultural psychiatry.
Tao Psychotherapy Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A Korean fusion of Western psychodynamics with Taoist and Buddhist self-cultivation, emphasizing the therapist's own purified mind. Rhee framed neurosis as nuclear feelings to be dissolved rather than analyzed.
Chinese Taoist Cognitive Psychotherapy Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A Chinese CBT variant that uses thirty-two Taoist principles, such as yielding and non-contention, as the alternative beliefs for cognitive restructuring. It has been trialed for anxiety in China.
Zhong Yong Thinking Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Interventions grounded in the Confucian doctrine of the mean, cultivating balanced, holistic and situationally flexible thinking. Chinese researchers link it to reduced depression.
Hakoniwa (Japanese Sandplay) Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Kawai brought Kalff's sandplay to Japan in 1965, where it became the most widely practiced psychotherapy and fused with Buddhist aesthetics. He argued that Japanese clients heal through the therapist's silent container rather than interpretation.
Dohsa-hou Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A Japanese method that began as movement training for cerebral palsy and evolved into a psychotherapy using bodily posture and relaxation tasks. It is unique in treating psychological change through motor action.
Core Shamanism Spiritual / Indigenous Fringe
Harner extracted what he saw as the universal elements of shamanic practice, especially drumming-induced journeying, into a teachable Western system. It is offered as counseling and healing outside licensed practice.
Soul Retrieval Spiritual / Indigenous Fringe
A core-shamanic practice in which the practitioner journeys to recover parts of the soul said to have fled during trauma. It parallels parts work in a spiritual idiom.
Spirit Releasement Therapy Spiritual / Indigenous Pseudoscientific
A hypnotic practice of dialoguing with and removing supposedly attached discarnate entities. It has no evidence and risks reinforcing delusional or dissociative beliefs.
Past-Life Regression Therapy Spiritual / Indigenous Pseudoscientific
Hypnotic regression to supposed previous incarnations, popularized by psychiatrist Brian Weiss's 1988 book. Research shows the memories are confabulated under suggestion.
Ho'oponopono Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A traditional Hawaiian family conflict-resolution process led by an elder, involving confession, discussion, forgiveness and release. A simplified New Age version of four phrases departs substantially from the original.
Te Whare Tapa Whā Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Durie's 1984 Māori model of wellbeing as the four walls of a meeting house: physical, spiritual, family and mental health, resting on connection to land. It is used across Aotearoa New Zealand as a holistic care framework.
Meihana Model Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A Māori clinical assessment framework extending Te Whare Tapa Whā to include the impact of colonization, racism and migration on the whānau in front of the clinician. It is taught in New Zealand medical schools.
Rongoā Māori Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Traditional Māori healing that integrates plant medicine, massage and spiritual practice. It is increasingly offered alongside mainstream mental health services.
Dadirri (Deep Listening) Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
An Aboriginal Australian practice of inner, quiet, still awareness and deep respectful listening, articulated by the Ngan'gikurunggurr elder Ungunmerr-Baumann. It is drawn on in culturally grounded counseling and trauma work.
Yarning Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
An Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander conversational practice of unhurried, relational storytelling adopted as a clinical and research method. Clinical yarning respects the rhythms of trust before problem-talk.
Ngangkari Healing Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Traditional healers of the Anangu lands of central Australia who treat spirit and body through touch and spiritual practice. They now work in partnership with clinics through the ANTAC organization.
Social and Emotional Wellbeing Framework Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
The Indigenous Australian model that places the individual within connections to body, mind, family, community, culture, land and ancestors. It reframes mental health in collective and historical terms.
Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief Intervention Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Developed with Lakota communities, it names the cumulative wounding of colonization and massacre and works through it in psychoeducational groups with ceremony. It originated the concept of historical trauma.
Two-Eyed Seeing Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A Mi'kmaq principle of looking with one eye through Indigenous knowledge and the other through Western science. It guides integrated mental health services in Canada.
Medicine Wheel and Red Road Approaches Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Healing frameworks from Plains and other nations that balance the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual quadrants of life. The Red Road is the sober, traditional path of recovery.
Wellbriety Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
White Bison's Native American recovery movement that adapts the twelve steps to the medicine wheel and teachings of the Cycle of Life. It includes the Healing Forest model of community-wide sobriety.
Sweat Lodge Ceremony Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A purification ceremony of many North American nations used within recovery and trauma programs under traditional leadership. Commercialized imitations have caused deaths and are condemned by Native communities.
Talking and Healing Circles Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Circle processes in which a talking piece passes and each person speaks without interruption, used in Indigenous justice, grief and recovery. They have been adapted into restorative practice worldwide.
Land-Based Healing Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Programs that bring Indigenous youth and adults onto ancestral land for cultural practice, harvesting and ceremony as treatment for addiction and trauma. They are central to Inuit and First Nations mental health strategies.
Curanderismo Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Mexican and Latin American folk healing that treats susto, empacho and nervios through herbs, prayer, ritual cleansing and counsel. Culturally competent clinicians often work alongside curanderos.
Cuento Therapy Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A modeling therapy for Puerto Rican children that uses folktales and adapted hero stories to convey adaptive values. Trials in New York showed reduced anxiety and improved behavior.
Dichos Therapy Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Uses Spanish proverbs as culturally resonant metaphors to build rapport and reframe problems with Latino clients. It is a technique rather than a full model.
Testimonio Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A Latin American practice of bearing witness to political violence through first-person narrative, used therapeutically with torture survivors and refugees. It links personal healing to collective memory and justice.
Liberation Psychology Spiritual / Indigenous Established
Born in El Salvador, it holds that psychology must side with the oppressed and treat social conditions rather than adjust people to them. Comas-Díaz and others have carried it into clinical practice with marginalized clients.
Sikolohiyang Pilipino Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
An indigenous Filipino psychology centered on kapwa, shared identity, and on culturally native concepts of feeling and relating. It shapes counseling in the Philippines and its diaspora.
Ubuntu Therapy Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Southern African approaches grounded in the ethic that a person is a person through other persons, emphasizing community reconciliation and belonging. It informs restorative and group work across the continent.
NTU Psychotherapy Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
An Afrocentric therapy built on the Bantu concept of NTU, the universal life force, and principles of harmony, balance and interconnectedness. It was developed at the Progressive Life Center in Washington, D.C.
Afrocentric Psychology Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Reconstructs psychology from African worldviews, treating spirit, community and rhythm as central. Myers's optimal theory and Nobles's work underpin the Association of Black Psychologists' clinical guidance.
Emotional Emancipation Circles Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Community Healing Network's culturally grounded support groups for Black people to work through the lie of Black inferiority and its emotional legacy. They are peer-led and free.
Zar Healing Ritual Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
A spirit-possession cult of Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt in which afflicted women are treated through music, dance and negotiation with the possessing spirit. Anthropologists read it as a socially sanctioned therapy for distress.
Ngoma Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
Bantu drumming and dance healing rites of central and southern Africa that induct the afflicted into a healing fellowship. They combine diagnosis, community and ongoing membership.
Sangoma Consultation Spiritual / Indigenous Culturally specific
South African traditional healers who divine causes of misfortune through ancestral communication and prescribe herbs and ritual. They are regulated by law and consulted by most of the population.
Anthroposophic Psychotherapy Spiritual / Indigenous Fringe
Applies Steiner's picture of body, soul and spirit, with artistic and biographical methods, in clinics across German-speaking Europe. Eurythmy therapy and biographical counseling are its distinctive tools.
Eurythmy Therapy Spiritual / Indigenous Pseudoscientific
An anthroposophic movement art in which speech sounds are translated into gestures believed to act on the etheric body. It is prescribed in Waldorf and anthroposophic settings without evidence of specific effect.
Historical, Discredited and Controversial 64 models
Moral Treatment Historical / Discredited Historical
The late eighteenth-century reform that unchained asylum patients and treated madness with kindness, routine, work and reason. It was the first humane psychological treatment and collapsed under overcrowding in the 1800s.
Mesmerism (Animal Magnetism) Historical / Discredited Historical
Mesmer's claim to cure by manipulating an invisible fluid with passes of the hands, debunked by a 1784 royal commission that included Benjamin Franklin. Its trance states became the raw material of hypnosis.
Braidism (Early Hypnotism) Historical / Discredited Historical
The Scottish surgeon who in 1841 stripped mesmerism of its fluid and explained trance as fixed attention, coining the word hypnotism. He put suggestion on a physiological footing.
Nancy School Suggestion Therapy Historical / Discredited Historical
Bernheim held that hypnosis was simply heightened suggestibility available to nearly everyone and used it for a wide range of complaints. Freud visited Nancy in 1889 and translated Bernheim's work.
Couéism (Autosuggestion) Historical / Discredited Historical
The French pharmacist's method of repeating a formula about improving every day, in every way, twenty times each morning and evening. A 1920s craze, it anticipated positive self-talk and placebo research.
Rest Cure Historical / Discredited Historical
Weeks of enforced bed rest, isolation, milk diet and massage prescribed mainly to women with neurasthenia. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story The Yellow Wallpaper is its lasting indictment.
Rational Persuasion Therapy Historical / Discredited Historical
The Swiss neurologist treated nervous disorders by reasoning with patients about their mistaken ideas, rejecting both hypnosis and Freud. His 1904 book was a direct ancestor of cognitive therapy.
Janet's Psychological Analysis Historical / Discredited Historical
Janet described dissociation, subconscious fixed ideas and the narrowing of consciousness under trauma decades before it was rediscovered. His treatment substituted neutral images for traumatic memories under hypnosis.
Pratt's Class Method Historical / Discredited Historical
A Boston physician's 1905 weekly classes for tuberculosis patients, combining instruction with mutual encouragement. It is usually counted as the first group psychotherapy.
Psychobiology and Distributive Analysis Historical / Discredited Historical
Meyer's common-sense psychiatry treated mental illness as a failed adaptation of the whole person, reviewed through a detailed life chart. His pragmatic, non-doctrinaire method dominated American psychiatry before psychoanalysis.
Mind Cure and New Thought Historical / Discredited Historical
The nineteenth-century American movement that held illness to be a product of wrong belief curable by right thinking. It fed Christian Science, positive thinking and much of self-help.
Total Push Therapy Historical / Discredited Historical
Myerson's 1939 regimen for chronic schizophrenic patients: exercise, ultraviolet light, massage, new clothes, praise and relentless activity. It was an early demonstration that institutional apathy was reversible.
Attitude Therapy and Reality Orientation Historical / Discredited Historical
Folsom's Veterans Administration programs prescribed a consistent staff attitude toward each patient and, for the confused elderly, repeated orientation to time, place and person. Reality orientation survives in dementia care.
Narcosynthesis Historical / Discredited Historical
Intravenous barbiturates were used in the Second World War to help soldiers relive and abreact combat trauma. It popularized the idea that war neurosis was treatable near the front.
Carbon Dioxide Inhalation Therapy Historical / Discredited Historical
Meduna's 1940s treatment of anxiety and neurosis with repeated inhalations of a carbon dioxide and oxygen mixture, producing brief unconsciousness and sometimes abreaction. It vanished with the arrival of tranquilizers.
Prolonged Sleep Therapy Historical / Discredited Historical
Continuous drug-induced sleep for days or weeks, introduced in Switzerland in 1920 and widely used in the Soviet Union. Deaths at Chelmsford Hospital in Australia in the 1960s and 70s ended its use.
Soviet Pavlovian Psychotherapy Historical / Discredited Historical
After the 1950 Pavlov Session, Soviet therapy was reorganized around conditioning, protective inhibition and collective rational persuasion. Freud was banned and hypnosis, sleep and suggestion favored.
Emotional-Stress Psychotherapy Historical / Discredited Historical
A Soviet method that deliberately induced strong positive emotion and hypnotic suggestion in groups to overcome alcoholism and neurosis. It reflected the collective ethos of the period.
Electrosleep Historical / Discredited Historical
Low-frequency current through the head to induce sleep and treat neurosis, developed in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. It is the ancestor of cranial electrotherapy devices.
Direct Analysis Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
Rosen claimed to cure schizophrenia by aggressively confronting patients with interpretations and acting as a parent, at times with physical force. Investigations revealed abuse and fraud, and he surrendered his license in 1983.
Recovered Memory Therapy Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
A 1980s and 90s practice of using hypnosis, guided imagery and suggestion to uncover supposedly repressed abuse. Research on false memory showed it created rather than recovered memories, and it led to wrongful accusations and successful malpractice suits.
Satanic Ritual Abuse Therapy Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
Treatment premised on the belief that clients had survived organized satanic cults, produced during the moral panic of the 1980s. No physical evidence of such cults was ever found and the practice caused severe iatrogenic harm.
Rebirthing / Attachment (Holding) Therapy Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
A coercive intervention that claimed to cure attachment disorder by forcing children to re-enact birth or endure prolonged restraint until they surrendered. It has no basis in attachment science, is linked to child deaths including Candace Newmaker in 2000, and is condemned by professional bodies.
Z-Process (Rage Reduction) Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
Zaslow's 1960s method held autistic and disturbed children down while provoking rage, on the theory that resistance had to be broken. He lost his license and the technique fed later holding therapies.
Holding Therapy Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
Mothers were instructed to hold autistic or defiant children against their will until they submitted. Professional bodies rejected it as coercive and without benefit.
Reparenting (Cathexis) Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
Schiff's transactional-analysis offshoot regressed psychotic adults to infancy, with bottles and diapers, to be raised again by the therapist. A patient died in 1972 and the Cathexis Institute was discredited.
Conversion / Reparative Therapy Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
A range of practices falsely premised on the idea that a same-sex orientation or transgender identity is a disorder to be changed. Every major medical and psychological body has found it ineffective and harmful and it is banned for minors in many jurisdictions.
Primal Therapy Historical / Discredited Historical
Janov argued that neurosis stems from repressed childhood pain resolved only by re-experiencing and screaming it out. Briefly famous after 1970, it was never validated and is now regarded as a historical curiosity.
Primal Integration Historical / Discredited Fringe
A gentler British descendant of primal therapy and Clinical Theology that works with birth and prenatal material in a supportive group. It survives in small training networks.
Center for Feeling Therapy Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
A Los Angeles offshoot of primal therapy that became a residential cult with hundreds of members subjected to humiliation and control. Its 1980 collapse produced the largest psychotherapy malpractice action in California history.
Rebirthing-Breathwork Historical / Discredited Fringe
Orr's 1970s practice of connected breathing, at first in warm water, to release the trauma of one's own birth. Distinct from the coercive attachment therapy of the same name, it remains a fringe breathwork.
Nude Psychotherapy Historical / Discredited Historical
Bindrim's late-1960s nude marathon groups claimed that shedding clothes shed defenses. A sensation of the human potential era, it disappeared within a decade.
Synanon Game Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
Brutal confrontational group sessions at the Synanon addiction community, which became a violent cult in the 1970s. The Game spawned attack therapy across the therapeutic-community movement.
Attack Therapy Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
Group confrontation in which a member is verbally assaulted to break down denial, used in Synanon-derived programs and troubled-teen facilities. Research finds it harmful, and it persists in some unregulated settings.
Confrontational Therapeutic Communities Historical / Discredited Historical
Daytop, Phoenix House and their imitators adapted Synanon's hierarchy and confrontation into drug-free residential treatment. Modern TCs have largely abandoned the harsh methods.
est (Erhard Seminars Training) Historical / Discredited Historical
A two-weekend large-group training of the 1970s that used confrontation, sleep restriction and philosophical exercises to produce a breakthrough called getting it. It became Landmark Education in 1991.
Landmark Forum Historical / Discredited Fringe
The successor to est, a three-day seminar on language and possibility sold as personal development. Studies show short-term wellbeing gains; critics note high-pressure recruiting.
Lifespring Historical / Discredited Historical
A large-group awareness training of the 1970s and 80s that used emotionally intense exercises to promote transformation. Several lawsuits over psychological injuries preceded its decline.
Large Group Awareness Training Historical / Discredited Fringe
The general category of multi-day commercial seminars promising transformation through intense group process. Psychologists have documented both benefit and psychiatric casualties.
Arica School Historical / Discredited Fringe
Ichazo's 1968 Chilean synthesis of Gurdjieff, Sufism and his own protoanalysis, which introduced the Enneagram of personality to the West. It is a spiritual school rather than a therapy.
Fischer-Hoffman Process (Hoffman Process) Historical / Discredited Fringe
A week-long residential program to resolve negative love patterns learned from parents, first channeled by Hoffman, a tailor and self-described psychic, in 1967. Later versions claim small positive studies.
Dianetics and Scientology Auditing Historical / Discredited Pseudoscientific
Claims that a device-guided question-and-answer process erases painful engrams stored in a reactive mind. Rejected by medicine as pseudoscience within months of its 1950 publication, it became the core of Scientology.
Traumatic Incident Reduction Historical / Discredited Fringe
A repeated-viewing imaginal exposure method that Gerbode, a former Scientologist, adapted from auditing into a secular protocol. It has a few small positive studies and a training body.
Orgone Therapy Historical / Discredited Pseudoscientific
Reich's later system of sitting patients in orgone accumulator boxes to absorb cosmic life energy. The FDA prosecuted him, burned his books and jailed him; the energy does not exist, though his earlier bodywork endures.
Senoi Dream Theory Historical / Discredited Pseudoscientific
The claim that a Malaysian tribe achieved mental health by controlling their dreams and sharing them at breakfast. Later fieldwork showed the account was largely invented.
Facilitated Communication Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
A facilitator supports the hand of a non-speaking person to type messages. Controlled tests show the facilitator authors the messages, and it has produced false abuse accusations.
Brain Gym Historical / Discredited Pseudoscientific
Simple movements claimed to integrate brain hemispheres and improve learning, sold widely to schools. Its neurological claims are false.
Irlen Method Historical / Discredited Pseudoscientific
Colored overlays and lenses said to treat a visual processing syndrome behind reading difficulty. Vision and psychology bodies find no evidence the syndrome exists.
Psychic Surgery and Faith Healing as Therapy Historical / Discredited Pseudoscientific
Claims to cure mental and physical illness through miraculous intervention, sometimes staged with sleight of hand. Their psychological effects are placebo, and delayed medical care has caused deaths.
Critical Incident Stress Debriefing Historical / Discredited Fringe
A single structured group session within days of a traumatic event, once standard for first responders. Randomized trials found no benefit and some harm, and guidelines now advise against mandatory debriefing.
Cogmed Working Memory Training Historical / Discredited Fringe
Computerized working-memory drills marketed for ADHD. Meta-analyses show gains on trained tasks that do not transfer to attention or academics.
Interactive Metronome Historical / Discredited Fringe
Clapping and tapping to a computer beat, claimed to improve timing, attention and coordination. Evidence is limited to small vendor-affiliated studies.
Wilderness Boot Camps Historical / Discredited Discredited (harmful)
Punitive outdoor programs for troubled teens using forced marches, food restriction and humiliation. Multiple deaths and abuse findings led to congressional hearings and state bans.
Duluth Model Historical / Discredited Fringe
The dominant psychoeducational program for men who batter, built on a feminist analysis of power and control. Meta-analyses find minimal effect on recidivism, though it remains court-mandated in most states.
Kingsley Hall and the Philadelphia Association Historical / Discredited Historical
Laing's 1965 experiment in a London community where psychosis could be lived through without medication or hierarchy. Chaotic and short-lived, it inspired later therapeutic households.
Anti-Psychiatry Historical / Discredited Historical
A 1960s movement arguing that mental illness was a myth, a label or a sane response to an insane society. It changed civil commitment law and seeded the survivor movement.
Democratic Psychiatry (Trieste) Historical / Discredited Established
Basaglia closed the Trieste asylum and replaced it with open community centers, leading to Italy's 1978 law abolishing mental hospitals. It is the model for deinstitutionalization done well.
Diabasis Historical / Discredited Historical
A Jungian residence in San Francisco in the 1970s where first-episode psychosis was treated as a renewal process to be accompanied rather than suppressed. Outcomes were reported as good, and it closed for lack of funding.
Windhorse Historical / Discredited Fringe
A Buddhist-informed home-based team approach to severe mental illness in which a household of attendants practices basic attendance with the person. It operates in Colorado and Massachusetts.
Arbours Association Historical / Discredited Historical
London therapeutic households founded in 1970 by Laing's colleagues as a longer-lived alternative to Kingsley Hall. It still runs a crisis center and training.
Gould Farm Historical / Discredited Established
A Massachusetts working farm founded in 1913 as the first American therapeutic community, where residents with mental illness share labor and meals. It remains open and studied.
Camphill Movement Historical / Discredited Culturally specific
Anthroposophic intentional communities founded in 1939 where people with disabilities live and work alongside co-workers. Their curative education blends Steiner's philosophy with community life.
Milieu Therapy Historical / Discredited Established
Treatment through the deliberate design of the ward or residence itself, so that every interaction and routine is therapeutic. It underlies therapeutic communities and modern inpatient units.
Therapeutic Community (Maxwell Jones) Historical / Discredited Established
Jones's democratic communities at Belmont and Dingleton flattened staff hierarchy and used daily community meetings as the treatment. The model spread to personality disorder and addiction services.
Psychedelic, Technological and Emerging 29 models
Psycholytic Therapy Psychedelic / Tech Historical
The European approach of the 1950s and 60s that gave repeated low doses of LSD within ongoing psychoanalytic therapy to loosen defenses. It contrasted with the American single high-dose psychedelic model.
Psychedelic Therapy (Saskatchewan Model) Psychedelic / Tech Historical
A single high-dose LSD session in a supportive setting aimed at a transformative peak experience, first used for alcoholism in Saskatchewan. Osmond coined the word psychedelic in 1957.
Powick LSD Program Psychedelic / Tech Historical
Britain's first psychedelic unit, opened at Powick Hospital in 1955, treated hundreds of patients with LSD-assisted psychotherapy. Its purpose-built unit closed in the mid-1960s and later prompted compensation claims.
LSD Psychotherapy (Grof) Psychedelic / Tech Historical
Grof's Prague and Maryland research mapped perinatal and transpersonal experiences under LSD and framed them as therapeutic. His cartography underlies transpersonal psychology and holotropic breathwork.
MDMA-Assisted Therapy Psychedelic / Tech Emerging
Combines two or three MDMA sessions with preparatory and integration psychotherapy for PTSD. The FDA declined approval in August 2024, released its complete response letter publicly in September 2025, and the sponsor resubmitted in 2026; it remains investigational in the United States.
Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy Psychedelic / Tech Emerging
A supervised high-dose psilocybin session with preparation and integration for depression, end-of-life distress and addiction. It is federally investigational but legally available through regulated programs in Oregon and Colorado.
Ketamine Therapy Clinics Psychedelic / Tech Evidence-based
Intravenous or intranasal ketamine for treatment-resistant depression and suicidality, with esketamine holding FDA approval since 2019. Effects are rapid but often short-lived without ongoing care.
Psychedelic Integration Therapy Psychedelic / Tech Emerging
Psychotherapy before and after a psychedelic experience, whether clinical or self-directed, to prepare and make meaning of it. Clinicians offer it without administering any substance.
Psychedelic Harm Reduction and Peer Support Psychedelic / Tech Emerging
Trained sitters at festivals and on hotlines such as the Fireside Project support people through difficult psychedelic experiences without judgment. It treats bad trips as opportunities rather than emergencies.
Ayahuasca-Assisted Therapy Psychedelic / Tech Fringe
Ceremonial use of the Amazonian DMT-containing brew, increasingly in retreat centers marketed for depression and addiction. Observational studies are positive; regulation, safety and cultural appropriation are unresolved.
Ibogaine Treatment Psychedelic / Tech Fringe
A West African psychedelic used mainly in unregulated clinics to interrupt opioid withdrawal. It carries a real risk of cardiac death and is under formal study in 2026.
5-MeO-DMT Therapy Psychedelic / Tech Fringe
A short-acting, extremely intense psychedelic from the Sonoran desert toad, now synthesized and in early trials for depression. Retreat use has raised safety and conservation concerns.
Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy Psychedelic / Tech Fringe
Uses cannabis or ketamine in a somatic, relational frame to surface and process autonomic trauma responses. It is a small practitioner community without controlled research.
Microdosing Psychedelic / Tech Fringe
Taking sub-perceptual doses of LSD or psilocybin on a schedule for mood and creativity. Placebo-controlled studies have found little beyond expectancy effects.
Cannabis-Assisted Psychotherapy Psychedelic / Tech Fringe
Structured sessions using cannabis to reduce defenses and access emotion, offered in legal states. It lacks research and is contested within the psychedelic field.
Internet-Delivered CBT (iCBT) Psychedelic / Tech Evidence-based
Structured online CBT modules with light therapist guidance by message. Swedish and Australian trials show effects comparable to face-to-face treatment for anxiety and depression.
AI Chatbot Therapy Psychedelic / Tech Emerging
Conversational software delivering CBT-style support, first as scripted bots and now with generative models. Woebot closed its consumer app in June 2025 citing regulatory costs, while Dartmouth's Therabot trial reported large symptom reductions under close oversight.
Video Game CBT (SPARX) Psychedelic / Tech Evidence-based
A New Zealand fantasy game that teaches CBT skills to depressed adolescents through quests. A randomized trial found it non-inferior to usual care and it is publicly funded there.
Telepsychotherapy Psychedelic / Tech Evidence-based
Video-delivered therapy, which became the default during the pandemic. Outcome research shows equivalence with in-person care for most conditions.
Digital Phenotyping and Just-in-Time Interventions Psychedelic / Tech Emerging
Passive smartphone data on sleep, movement and typing used to detect relapse and trigger brief interventions. It is promising but raises privacy questions.
Augmented Reality Exposure Psychedelic / Tech Emerging
Overlays virtual spiders, heights or crowds onto the real environment through a headset for exposure therapy. Early trials for specific phobias are positive.
Avatar Therapy for Voices Psychedelic / Tech Emerging
The patient builds a computer avatar of a persecutory voice, which the therapist then voices in dialogue so the patient can practice standing up to it. UK trials show reduced distress and frequency of voices.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation with Therapy Psychedelic / Tech Evidence-based
Non-invasive magnetic stimulation of the prefrontal cortex, FDA-cleared for depression and OCD, increasingly paired with concurrent psychotherapy. The combination is under study for additive effect.
Memory Reconsolidation-Based Therapy Psychedelic / Tech Emerging
A cross-modality framework holding that emotional learnings can be erased if reactivated and then contradicted within a window of hours. It explains the mechanism claimed by coherence therapy, EMDR and others.
Sleep and Nightmare Rescripting (Imagery Rehearsal) Psychedelic / Tech Evidence-based
The patient rewrites a recurrent nightmare while awake and rehearses the new version daily. It is the first-line treatment for trauma-related nightmares.
Lucid Dreaming Therapy Psychedelic / Tech Emerging
Training patients to become aware inside their dreams so they can confront or alter nightmare content. Small studies support it for chronic nightmares.
Intensive Sleep Retraining Psychedelic / Tech Emerging
A single night in the laboratory during which the patient is woken after each brief sleep onset dozens of times, reconditioning rapid sleep. Australian trials show durable insomnia improvement.
Chronotherapy and Social Rhythm Therapy Psychedelic / Tech Evidence-based
Interpersonal and Social Rhythm Therapy stabilizes daily routines and sleep to protect people with bipolar disorder from relapse. Light and wake manipulations are used adjunctively.
Neurofeedback for PTSD (Othmer ILF) Psychedelic / Tech Fringe
Infra-low-frequency training claimed to calm the arousal system in developmental trauma. Van der Kolk's small trial was positive, but replication is lacking.
Group, Community and Milieu 28 models
Group Analysis Group / Community Established
Foulkes's psychoanalytic group method treats the group matrix as the therapeutic agent and the conductor as one voice within it. It is the dominant training model in Britain and Europe.
Tavistock Group Relations Group / Community Established
Bion's basic assumptions of dependency, fight-flight and pairing describe how groups regress under anxiety. The Leicester conference and its offspring let participants study authority live.
Median Group Group / Community Fringe
Groups of twenty to thirty that meet to develop dialogue and koinonia, or impersonal fellowship, rather than treat individuals. De Maré saw them as a bridge between therapy and citizenship.
Social Dreaming Matrix Group / Community Fringe
Participants share dreams not to interpret the dreamer but to discover what the dreams say about the organization or society. It is used in consultancy and community reflection.
Systems-Centered Therapy Group / Community Emerging
Uses functional subgrouping, in which members join with similarity before exploring difference, to keep groups from scapegoating. Agazarian built it from living human systems theory.
Operative Groups Group / Community Culturally specific
An Argentine method in which a group works on an explicit task while a coordinator interprets the implicit anxieties that obstruct it. It shaped Latin American community and institutional work.
Integrative Community Therapy Group / Community Culturally specific
Brazilian open community circles in a public square where people share problems and collective wisdom. Thousands of trained facilitators run it within the national health system.
Schwartz Rounds Group / Community Evidence-based
Monthly facilitated meetings where hospital staff discuss the emotional impact of patient care. Evaluations show reduced staff distress and better teamwork.
Intentional Peer Support Group / Community Emerging
A peer-run practice built on mutual, non-hierarchical relationship rather than helper and helped. It underpins certified peer specialist roles in many public systems.
Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) Group / Community Evidence-based
A peer-developed self-management plan of daily wellness tools, triggers, early warning signs and crisis plans. Trials show reduced symptoms and increased hope.
Clubhouse Model Group / Community Evidence-based
Begun at Fountain House in 1948, clubhouses are member-run communities offering work-ordered days and transitional employment. They reduce hospitalization and increase employment.
Assertive Community Treatment Group / Community Evidence-based
A mobile multidisciplinary team with shared caseloads that brings treatment to people with severe mental illness wherever they are. It is among the most replicated interventions in psychiatry.
Individual Placement and Support Group / Community Evidence-based
Rapid competitive job placement with ongoing support, integrated into mental health treatment. It roughly doubles employment rates for people with serious mental illness.
Open Dialogue Group / Community Emerging
A Finnish network approach to acute psychosis that convenes patient, family and professionals in transparent meetings within a day, favoring dialogue over medication. Western Lapland outcomes are striking and international trials are under way.
Need-Adapted Treatment Group / Community Historical
The Finnish predecessor of Open Dialogue that tailored psychosis treatment to each family's needs through team meetings. It laid the ground for the later dialogic model.
Soteria Group / Community Emerging
A residential alternative to hospitalization for acute psychosis emphasizing being with the person in a home-like setting with minimal medication. Outcome studies suggest results comparable to standard care.
Hearing Voices Movement Group / Community Emerging
Reframes voice-hearing as meaningful experience to be understood and lived with, through peer groups and structured interviews about the voices. It has a large international network and growing research interest.
Relating Therapy for Voices Group / Community Emerging
Applies interpersonal theory to the relationship between a person and their voices, coaching assertive rather than submissive responses. It is trialed in British services.
Family Psychoeducation for Psychosis Group / Community Evidence-based
Structured education and problem-solving with families of people with schizophrenia to lower expressed emotion. It halves relapse rates and is guideline-recommended.
Illness Management and Recovery Group / Community Evidence-based
A curriculum teaching people with serious mental illness about their condition, medication, relapse prevention and coping. It is an evidence-based practice in U.S. public systems.
Restorative Justice Circles Group / Community Emerging
Facilitated encounters between people who caused harm, those harmed and the community, drawn from Indigenous practice. They are used in schools and courts and reduce reoffending in some studies.
Nurture Groups Group / Community Evidence-based
Small classroom groups in UK schools that offer attachment-informed care, breakfast and play to children who missed early nurturing. Evaluations show gains in emotional and academic functioning.
Social and Emotional Learning Programs Group / Community Evidence-based
School curricula such as PATHS and Second Step that teach emotion recognition, self-regulation and relationship skills. Meta-analyses show improved behavior and achievement.
ManKind Project Group / Community Fringe
A men's organization running the New Warrior Training Adventure weekend, an initiation combining group process and ritual. A participant's 2005 death prompted lawsuits and scrutiny, though many report benefit.
Mythopoetic Men's Work Group / Community Fringe
Bly's Iron John and the gatherings it inspired used myth, drumming and grief work to address the wounds of fathers and sons. Robert Moore's archetypes gave it a clinical vocabulary.
Women's Circles Group / Community Fringe
Peer gatherings for reflection and support structured by shared ritual and equal speaking time. Bolen framed them as a Jungian and political practice.
Psychoeducational Groups Group / Community Evidence-based
Time-limited groups that teach a specific body of knowledge and skills, from anger management to living with bipolar disorder. They are the most common group format in public services.
Self-Help and Mutual Aid Groups Group / Community Evidence-based
Peer-led groups organized around a shared condition, from GROW to bereavement circles. Participation reliably improves outcomes at negligible cost.
Population- and Problem-Specific Protocols 85 models
Prolonged Exposure (PE) Protocols Evidence-based
Repeated imaginal retelling of the trauma memory plus in-vivo approach to avoided situations over eight to fifteen sessions. It is the most researched PTSD treatment.
Written Exposure Therapy Protocols Evidence-based
Five sessions of thirty-minute structured writing about the trauma with minimal therapist contact. Non-inferior to CPT in trials, it is spreading because of its brevity.
Brief Eclectic Psychotherapy for PTSD Protocols Evidence-based
A sixteen-session Dutch protocol combining exposure, letter writing, meaning-making and a farewell ritual. It is one of the few PTSD treatments that explicitly addresses grief and honor.
STAIR Narrative Therapy Protocols Evidence-based
Skills Training in Affective and Interpersonal Regulation precedes narrative exposure for survivors of childhood abuse. It is designed for complex PTSD.
TARGET Protocols Evidence-based
Trauma Affect Regulation: Guide for Education and Therapy teaches a seven-step FREEDOM sequence for emotion regulation without requiring trauma disclosure. It is used in juvenile justice and with adolescents.
Seeking Safety Protocols Evidence-based
A present-focused, twenty-five-topic coping-skills treatment for co-occurring PTSD and substance use. Its safety-first design allows use in shelters and jails.
Trauma Recovery and Empowerment Model (TREM) Protocols Evidence-based
A group intervention for women with histories of abuse and serious mental illness, moving from empowerment through trauma education to skill building. It is an early example of trauma-informed group care.
Sanctuary Model Protocols Emerging
A whole-organization approach to creating trauma-informed cultures in residential and school settings, built on seven commitments and the SELF framework. It targets the institution rather than the individual.
ARC Framework Protocols Evidence-based
Attachment, Regulation and Competency organizes treatment of complex childhood trauma into ten building blocks delivered by caregivers and clinicians. It is flexible rather than manualized.
Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) Protocols Emerging
A caregiver training model from Texas Christian University for children from hard places, built on connecting, empowering and correcting principles. It is widely used in adoption and foster care.
CBITS (Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Trauma in Schools) Protocols Evidence-based
A ten-session school-based group CBT for children exposed to violence, developed for Los Angeles schools. It is designed to be delivered by school clinicians.
Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST) Protocols Emerging
Fisher's parts-based approach to self-harm and suicidality in complex trauma, integrating sensorimotor psychotherapy and structural dissociation. It avoids memory work until stabilization.
Fractionated Abreaction Protocols Established
Hypnotic techniques for processing trauma in dissociative identity disorder in small controlled portions. Kluft's rule of thirds protects the session from destabilization.
Dissociative Table Technique Protocols Established
An imagined conference table at which a client's dissociated parts can be seated and addressed. It is a standard tool in dissociative disorders treatment.
Phase-Oriented Trauma Treatment Protocols Evidence-based
Herman's three stages of safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection organize nearly all complex trauma work. Her 1992 book named complex PTSD.
Community Reinforcement Approach (CRA) Protocols Evidence-based
Rearranges a person's environment so that sobriety is more rewarding than use, with job, social and recreational counseling. It consistently outperforms standard addiction treatment.
CRAFT Protocols Evidence-based
Trains family members of a treatment-refusing substance user to change their own behavior so the person enters treatment. It engages about two-thirds of cases, far more than intervention or Al-Anon.
Relapse Prevention Protocols Evidence-based
A cognitive-behavioral model of high-risk situations, coping and the abstinence violation effect. It reframes lapses as learning rather than failure.
Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention Protocols Evidence-based
Combines mindfulness practice with relapse prevention skills, teaching urge surfing. Trials show reduced days of use versus standard aftercare.
Harm Reduction Psychotherapy Protocols Emerging
Works with people who use substances without requiring abstinence, treating drug use as meaningful and collaborating on any positive change. It is the clinical arm of the harm-reduction movement.
SMART Recovery Protocols Evidence-based
A secular mutual-aid program built on REBT and motivational interviewing with a four-point program. It offers an evidence-informed alternative to twelve-step meetings.
Rational Recovery (AVRT) Protocols Fringe
Addictive Voice Recognition Technique teaches people to identify the internal beast that argues for drinking and make a one-time decision never to use again. It rejects groups and treatment entirely.
Refuge Recovery and Recovery Dharma Protocols Emerging
Buddhist-based recovery programs organized around the four noble truths and eightfold path. Recovery Dharma split off as a peer-led alternative in 2019.
Moderation Management Protocols Fringe
A program for problem drinkers who wish to cut down rather than abstain, with limits and a thirty-day abstinence start. Its founder's later drunk-driving deaths fueled controversy.
Matrix Model Protocols Evidence-based
A sixteen-week intensive outpatient program for stimulant addiction combining CBT, family education, twelve-step support and drug testing. It is a SAMHSA-listed evidence-based practice.
Schick Shadel Aversion Treatment Protocols Historical
A ten-day hospital program pairing alcohol with emetics to condition nausea to drinking, run in Seattle since 1935. It is the last major survivor of chemical aversion therapy.
Orgasmic Reconditioning Protocols Historical
A behavioral technique for paraphilias that shifts arousal toward acceptable stimuli during masturbation. It is little used today and its evidence is weak.
Surrogate Partner Therapy Protocols Fringe
A trained surrogate works with a therapist and client on intimacy and sexual functioning through structured touch. Masters and Johnson introduced it, and IPSA now sets standards for a small field.
Good Enough Sex Model Protocols Established
Replaces performance ideals with realistic expectations of variable, satisfying couple sexuality. It is a common framework in modern sex therapy.
CBT-E (Enhanced CBT for Eating Disorders) Protocols Evidence-based
A transdiagnostic treatment targeting the over-evaluation of shape and weight and the mechanisms maintaining it. It is first-line for bulimia and binge eating in adults.
MANTRA Protocols Evidence-based
The Maudsley Model of Anorexia Nervosa Treatment for Adults addresses thinking style, emotion avoidance and the responses of others. It matches CBT-E in trials.
Specialist Supportive Clinical Management Protocols Evidence-based
A pragmatic combination of clinical management and supportive therapy for anorexia that unexpectedly matched specialized treatments in trials. It emphasizes nutrition and a good relationship.
Intuitive Eating and Weight-Inclusive Care Protocols Emerging
Rejects dieting in favor of hunger and fullness cues and body respect, within the Health at Every Size framework. It reduces disordered eating in studies though it is contested in obesity medicine.
CAMS (Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality) Protocols Evidence-based
A suicide-specific framework in which patient and clinician sit side by side to assess and treat the drivers of suicidality. It reduces ideation and attempts in randomized trials.
Brief CBT for Suicide Prevention Protocols Evidence-based
A twelve-session military-developed protocol that cut suicide attempts by sixty percent in a soldier trial. It centers crisis response planning and relapse prevention.
ASSIP Protocols Evidence-based
The Attempted Suicide Short Intervention Program uses a videotaped narrative interview, a case conceptualization and two years of letters. A Swiss trial found an eighty percent reduction in reattempts.
Safety Planning Intervention Protocols Evidence-based
A single-session collaborative written plan of warning signs, coping strategies, contacts and means safety. It is standard in emergency departments.
Complicated Grief Treatment Protocols Evidence-based
A sixteen-session treatment for prolonged grief combining loss-focused imaginal revisiting with restoration of life goals. It outperformed interpersonal therapy in trials.
Meaning Reconstruction in Grief Protocols Established
A constructivist approach that helps the bereaved re-author the story of the death and of themselves. It integrates narrative, expressive and continuing-bonds methods.
Companioning the Bereaved Protocols Established
Wolfelt's counter to treatment models: the helper walks alongside the mourner rather than fixing grief. It shapes hospice and funeral-service bereavement care.
Tasks of Mourning Model Protocols Established
Worden's four tasks of accepting the loss, processing the pain, adjusting to the world and finding an enduring connection. It replaced fixed stage models in grief counseling.
Dual Process Model of Bereavement Protocols Established
Describes healthy grief as oscillating between loss-oriented and restoration-oriented coping. It legitimizes taking breaks from grief.
Perinatal Mental Health Therapy Protocols Evidence-based
Interpersonal and cognitive therapies adapted to pregnancy and the postpartum period, including the mother-infant relationship. IPT has the strongest evidence for perinatal depression.
Interpersonal Therapy (IPT) Protocols Evidence-based
A time-limited treatment for depression that works on one of four problem areas: grief, role dispute, role transition or interpersonal deficit. It is a WHO-recommended first-line therapy.
Validation Therapy Protocols Established
Enters the emotional reality of people with dementia rather than correcting them, validating feelings behind confused speech. Evidence is limited but it changed dementia care culture.
Cognitive Stimulation Therapy Protocols Evidence-based
Fourteen themed group sessions of enjoyable mental activity for mild to moderate dementia. It is the only psychological intervention for dementia recommended by NICE.
Simulated Presence Therapy Protocols Fringe
Playing a recorded conversation from a family member to a person with dementia to reduce agitation. Results are mixed and it raises questions about deception.
Doll Therapy in Dementia Protocols Emerging
Offering lifelike dolls to people with advanced dementia, who often care for them with visible comfort. Observational studies show reduced agitation and ethical debate about infantilization.
Snoezelen Multisensory Environments Protocols Emerging
Rooms of light, sound, texture and scent developed in the Netherlands for profound disability and later dementia. They reduce agitation during use though effects fade afterward.
Montessori Methods for Dementia Protocols Emerging
Applies Montessori principles of graded, meaningful, self-correcting activity to people with dementia. It increases engagement and reduces responsive behaviors.
Behavioral Treatment for Depression in Dementia Protocols Evidence-based
Teaches caregivers to increase pleasant events and manage behavior for depressed people with Alzheimer's disease. It improved both patient and caregiver mood in trials.
SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions) Protocols Evidence-based
A parent-only treatment for child anxiety and OCD that reduces family accommodation without the child attending. It matched child CBT in a Yale trial.
Coping Cat Protocols Evidence-based
The standard sixteen-session CBT for anxious children, using the FEAR plan and a workbook. It has strong trial support and many adaptations.
PCIT for Selective Mutism Protocols Evidence-based
Adapts parent-child interaction therapy with graduated exposure so that mute children begin speaking to new people. It is now the leading treatment.
Lidcombe Program Protocols Evidence-based
An Australian parent-delivered operant treatment for early childhood stuttering using praise for fluent speech. It is the first-line treatment for preschoolers.
CBIT for Tics Protocols Evidence-based
Comprehensive Behavioral Intervention for Tics combines habit reversal, function-based interventions and relaxation. It reduced tics comparably to medication in trials.
ComB Model for BFRBs Protocols Emerging
The Comprehensive Behavioral model assesses hair-pulling and skin-picking across sensory, cognitive, affective, motor and place domains and matches interventions to each. It individualizes habit reversal.
CBT for Hoarding Protocols Evidence-based
A specialized protocol combining decision-making training, exposure to discarding and home visits. Buried in Treasures is its group workshop form.
Anger Treatment (Novaco) Protocols Evidence-based
A stress-inoculation approach with cognitive preparation, skill acquisition and graded provocation rehearsal. It is the foundation of most anger management programs.
Risk-Need-Responsivity Model Protocols Evidence-based
The dominant correctional framework matching treatment intensity to risk level, targeting criminogenic needs and adapting to learning style. It reliably reduces recidivism.
Good Lives Model Protocols Emerging
A strengths-based alternative in offender rehabilitation that helps people pursue primary human goods legitimately. It is used alongside RNR, especially in sexual offending treatment.
Moral Reconation Therapy Protocols Evidence-based
A workbook-based group treatment that moves offenders through stages of moral reasoning. It is widely used in U.S. corrections with modest recidivism effects.
Reasoning and Rehabilitation Protocols Evidence-based
A Canadian cognitive-skills program teaching problem solving, perspective taking and self-control to offenders. It seeded the Thinking for a Change curriculum.
Aggression Replacement Training Protocols Evidence-based
Ten weeks of social skills, anger control and moral reasoning training for aggressive youth. It is used in schools and juvenile facilities worldwide.
Circles of Support and Accountability Protocols Evidence-based
Volunteers form a circle around a released high-risk sex offender to provide support and monitoring. Canadian and British evaluations show large recidivism reductions.
Psychological First Aid Protocols Established
An evidence-informed set of supportive actions for the first hours and days after disaster that replaced debriefing. It emphasizes safety, calming, connectedness and hope.
CBT for Chronic Pain Protocols Evidence-based
Teaches pacing, activity scheduling and cognitive reappraisal of pain-related fear. It has decades of evidence and is standard in pain clinics.
ACT for Chronic Pain Protocols Evidence-based
Focuses on willingness to have pain while pursuing valued living, rather than controlling it. Trials show equivalence with CBT and better outcomes for some.
Reattribution and Somatic Symptom Therapy Protocols Evidence-based
A structured consultation teaching patients how physical symptoms can arise from stress, developed for primary care. It is one strand of a growing field of treatments for functional disorders.
Adult ADHD CBT Protocols Evidence-based
Skills-based treatment of organization, planning and distractibility for adults still impaired despite medication. Safren's protocol is the most studied.
Behavioral Parent Training Protocols Evidence-based
Patterson's Oregon model teaches parents to break coercive cycles with consistent reinforcement and consequences. It underlies nearly all evidence-based programs for child conduct problems.
Early Start Denver Model Protocols Evidence-based
A play-based early intervention for toddlers with autism that embeds naturalistic behavioral teaching in relationships. A randomized trial showed gains in IQ and adaptive behavior.
Pivotal Response Treatment Protocols Evidence-based
Targets pivotal areas such as motivation and self-initiation in natural settings so that broad improvements follow. It is a child-led alternative to discrete-trial ABA.
DIR/Floortime Protocols Emerging
Follows the child's lead on the floor to build the developmental capacities for relating and communicating. It is relationship-based and has moderate evidence.
Son-Rise Program Protocols Fringe
A home-based, parent-led program of joining a child's autistic behaviors to build connection, marketed by the Option Institute. It lacks controlled evidence.
Relationship Development Intervention Protocols Fringe
A parent-led program aiming to build dynamic intelligence and experience sharing in autistic children. Evidence is limited to uncontrolled reports.
PEERS Social Skills Protocols Evidence-based
A manualized social skills program for autistic adolescents and young adults with parallel parent sessions. It has multiple randomized trials.
LEGO-Based Therapy Protocols Emerging
Children with autism build LEGO sets in assigned roles of engineer, supplier and builder to practice collaboration. Small trials show social gains.
Neurodiversity-Affirming Therapy Protocols Emerging
An approach that treats autism and ADHD as differences to be accommodated rather than deficits to be normalized. It reshapes goals away from masking toward wellbeing.
Gender-Affirming Therapy Protocols Established
Supports a client's exploration and expression of gender identity without a predetermined outcome, following WPATH standards. It is the professional consensus alternative to conversion practices.
Feminist Therapy Protocols Established
Analyzes distress in the context of gender and power, sharing authority with the client and connecting the personal to the political. It shaped trauma treatment and multicultural practice.
Multicultural Counseling Protocols Established
Sue's framework of cultural competence, awareness, knowledge and skills, and his work on microaggressions. It is now a required component of counselor training.
Racial Trauma Therapy Protocols Emerging
Treats the cumulative injury of racism as trauma, combining liberation psychology, narrative and somatic approaches. It is a fast-growing area of practice.
Disability-Affirmative Therapy Protocols Emerging
Views disability through a social and cultural lens rather than as personal tragedy, with attention to accessibility and ableism in the therapy itself. Olkin's model guides training.
Sex-Positive and Kink-Aware Therapy Protocols Emerging
Clinicians competent in consensual non-monogamy, kink and diverse sexualities who do not pathologize them. The Kink-Aware Professionals directory set the early standard.
Social Skills Training Cognitive / Behavioral Evidence-based
A behavioral intervention focused on teaching interpersonal communication and social interaction skills. It heavily uses modeling, role-playing, and positive reinforcement to improve social functioning.