Therapeutic Approaches at Théla

Therapy isn't just talking. The way a therapist is trained to work with you shapes what becomes possible in the room. At Théla Psychotherapy Clinic, our clinicians are trained in a range of evidence-based modalities — each one developed through decades of research, and each one chosen because it works for specific presentations, histories, and goals.

This page is designed to help you understand what these approaches are, who they're best suited for, and what you might expect if your therapist recommends one.

If you're unsure which approach fits your situation, that's exactly what an initial consultation is for — we'll help you find the right fit.

EMDR is one of the most thoroughly researched trauma therapies in the world, endorsed by the World Health Organization, the American Psychological Association, and Health Canada. It was developed in the late 1980s by Dr. Francine Shapiro, and has since become a gold-standard treatment for post-traumatic stress.

The premise of EMDR is grounded in neuroscience. When we experience something traumatic, the brain sometimes fails to process the memory the way it would a normal event. Instead, that memory gets "stuck" — stored with the same emotional charge it had at the time, so that years later, a smell, a sound, or a glance can trigger a full-body trauma response. EMDR works by using bilateral stimulation (most commonly eye movements, taps, or tones) while the person briefly focuses on the distressing memory. This process is thought to activate the brain's natural adaptive processing system — similar to what happens during REM sleep — allowing the memory to be reprocessed and stored in a way that no longer triggers the nervous system.

EMDR is often described by clients as surprising: many report that memories that once felt overwhelming begin to feel more distant, more like something that happened rather than something that's still happening. It is not about forgetting or rewriting the past — it is about changing the way your nervous system responds to it.

At Théla, our EMDR therapists are EMDRIA-trained and work with adults navigating single-incident trauma, complex developmental trauma, attachment wounds, and high-functioning presentations of PTSD that have often gone unrecognized for years.

Existential therapy does not offer techniques or skills worksheets. It offers something rarer: a framework for sitting with the most fundamental questions of human existence — and finding a way to live with them rather than being paralyzed by them.

Rooted in the philosophical tradition of existentialism (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir), existential therapy was developed as a clinical approach by thinkers like Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, and Irvin Yalom. Yalom identified four "ultimate concerns" that underlie much of human psychological suffering: death, freedom (and its accompanying responsibility), isolation, and meaninglessness. Rather than treating these as problems to be solved, existential therapy treats them as conditions of human life to be faced, understood, and integrated.

Existential therapy tends to be exploratory, philosophical, and deeply relational — the therapeutic relationship itself is considered a primary vehicle of change. It is less interested in symptom reduction than in how a person relates to their own existence: the choices they make (and avoid), the stories they tell about themselves and the world, and the ways they confront or evade the knowledge of their own mortality and freedom.

It is often the therapy of choice for clients navigating major life transitions — retirement, divorce, serious illness, loss, or a growing sense that the life they are living no longer fits who they are. It is also powerful for those who feel that standard, symptom-focused therapies have missed something essential about their experience.

DBT was originally developed by Dr. Marsha Linehan in the 1980s for individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) — a population for whom standard cognitive-behavioural approaches were often insufficient. What made DBT revolutionary was its integration of two seemingly opposing ideas: acceptance and change. The "dialectic" at the heart of the model is this — you are doing the best you can, and you need to do better.

 DBT is structured around four core skill sets:

• Mindfulness — the foundation of all DBT skills; learning to observe your internal experience without judgment or reactivity
• Distress tolerance — skills for surviving crisis without making things worse
• Emotional regulation — understanding your emotional responses, reducing vulnerability, and shifting emotional states over time
• Interpersonal effectiveness — communicating needs, setting limits, and maintaining self-respect in relationships

DBT is particularly well-suited for individuals who feel emotions more intensely than others, who have experienced chronic invalidation, or who find that their emotional responses feel disproportionate and difficult to manage. It is also increasingly used beyond its original BPD application — with strong evidence for depression, eating disorders, substance use, and ADHD-related emotional dysregulation.

At Théla, DBT skills are offered both within individual therapy and embedded across our clinical approach. Our certified DBT therapists hold formal training and use DBT as a structured, evidence-based framework — not loosely adapted skills pulled out of context.

The Gottman Method is one of the most extensively researched approaches to couples therapy in the world. Developed by Drs. John and Julie Gottman, it is built on over four decades of observational research involving thousands of couples — and it gives therapists (and couples themselves) an unusually precise map of what makes relationships work, and what erodes them.

Central to the Gottman model is the concept of the "Sound Relationship House" — a research-informed framework describing the layers of a healthy relationship, from friendship and fondness to shared meaning and trust. The work of Gottman therapy is to identify which layers of your relationship need repair or strengthening, and to build concrete, personalized skills to get there.

The research also identified what Gottman calls the "Four Horsemen" — predictors of relationship dissolution: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. These patterns are not signs that a relationship is doomed; they are patterns that, once recognized and interrupted, can be replaced with more effective forms of communication.

Gottman therapy is for any couple who wants to build something better — whether they are in acute crisis or simply recognizing that they keep having the same fights without resolution. It is structured, skills-based, and rooted in research. At Théla, our Gottman-trained therapists hold Levels 1 and 2 certification, and work with couples of all backgrounds, orientations, and relationship structures.

Emotionally Focused Therapy is grounded in attachment theory — the idea, originally proposed by John Bowlby, that human beings have a fundamental need for safe emotional connection with others, and that much of our distress — in relationships, in our bodies, and internally — can be traced back to disruptions in that connection.

EFT was developed by Dr. Sue Johnson in the 1980s and has since become one of the most empirically supported approaches to couples and individual therapy. The model focuses on identifying and restructuring the emotional patterns and interactional cycles that keep people stuck — the pursuer-withdrawer cycle, the protest-shutdown cycle, and the reach-rejection cycle that are so common in couples experiencing distress.

At its core, EFT asks: What is the deeper emotional experience underneath this conflict? Often, what looks like anger is fear. What looks like withdrawal is grief. EFT helps clients access those more vulnerable emotional layers and communicate from that place — creating moments of genuine connection that slowly shift the emotional landscape of the relationship.

EFT is used at Théla for both couples and individuals. For individuals, EFT principles help explore how early attachment experiences show up in present-day emotional patterns, relationships, and self-concept — often with transformative results.

Internal Family Systems, developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, offers a framework that many clients find both immediately intuitive and profoundly organizing: the idea that the mind is not a single, unified thing, but rather a system of parts — each with its own perspective, age, emotion, and protective role.

You may already have language for this without knowing it: the part of you that desperately wants connection, and the part that pulls back before you get hurt. The part that knows you need rest, and the part that pushes you to work through exhaustion. The inner critic that sounds like your mother, or a teacher, or your own voice turned harsh.

In IFS, these parts are not pathological — they are adaptive responses to difficult experiences, doing their best to protect the person's core Self. The work of IFS is not to eliminate or argue with these parts, but to understand them, develop a relationship with them, and help the ones carrying burdens of pain or fear find relief.

IFS is particularly powerful for clients who have experienced complex trauma, childhood neglect or emotional abuse, chronic shame, or patterns of self-sabotage that feel disconnected from their stated values and intentions. It is also widely used for PTSD, anxiety, perfectionism, and relational difficulties.

At Théla, IFS-informed therapy is integrated across our trauma work, often used alongside EMDR and somatic approaches for clients navigating layered, complex presentations.

Narrative therapy, developed by Michael White and David Epston in Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s, is grounded in the idea that people make sense of their lives through stories — and that the dominant story a person holds about themselves is rarely the complete or only possible story.

When someone comes to therapy saying "I am depressed" or "I am anxious," narrative therapy invites a subtle but profound shift: from seeing the person as the problem, to seeing the problem as separate from the person. This practice, called externalization, helps clients observe the problem — depression, self-doubt, shame — as something that has influence over them, rather than something they are. From that position, it becomes possible to examine that influence, challenge it, and begin to write a different story.

Narrative therapy also explores unique outcomes — the exceptions to the problem story, the moments when the person resisted or survived in ways that don't fit the dominant narrative. These become the seeds of an alternative story about who the person is and what they are capable of.

Because of its attentiveness to power, culture, and social context, narrative therapy is particularly well-suited for clients whose experiences have been shaped by systemic marginalization — immigrants and refugees, racialized communities, Indigenous clients, LGBTQ+ individuals, and others whose stories have been written for them by systems and institutions rather than themselves.

Developed by Carl Rogers in the 1950s, person-centred therapy is built on a radical premise: that human beings have within them an innate drive toward growth, healing, and self-actualization — and that what prevents that growth is not a lack of skills or insight, but a lack of the right conditions.

Rogers identified three core conditions that a therapist must provide to create healing: unconditional positive regard (genuine, non-judgmental acceptance of the client), empathic understanding (deeply hearing not just what the client says but what they mean), and congruence (the therapist being authentic and real in the relationship, not hiding behind a professional facade).

Person-centred therapy does not follow a structured protocol. The therapist follows the client's lead, trusting that the person is the expert on their own experience. This makes it quite different from CBT or DBT — it is not a therapy that teaches you skills or challenges your thinking; it is a therapy that provides a quality of relational presence that many people have rarely, if ever, experienced.

Person-centred principles have profoundly influenced virtually every other therapeutic modality — they form the relational foundation of trauma-informed practice, and many therapists who identify primarily with another modality (EMDR, IFS, EFT) draw heavily on Rogerian principles in how they show up with clients.

Psychodynamic therapy descends from the psychoanalytic tradition of Sigmund Freud, but has evolved considerably from its origins. Modern psychodynamic therapy is less focused on symbolic interpretation and lengthy free association, and more focused on how early relationships and experiences shape the unconscious patterns, defences, and relational templates we carry into adult life.

The central assumption of psychodynamic work is that much of what drives our behaviour, our emotional responses, and our relational difficulties is outside our immediate awareness — and that making those patterns conscious, in the context of a safe and consistent therapeutic relationship, creates the conditions for genuine and lasting change.

Psychodynamic therapy tends to be longer-term and less structured than CBT or DBT. It places significant weight on the therapeutic relationship itself as a site of healing — the patterns that emerge between therapist and client (known as transference and countertransference) are seen as valuable information about how the client relates in the wider world. Progress is often more gradual and non-linear, but for clients who want depth rather than symptom management, it can offer transformation that skills-based approaches don't always reach.

Solution-focused brief therapy inverts the usual therapeutic question. Rather than "What is wrong, and where did it come from?" it asks: "What does life look like when things are working — and what are you already doing that gets you closer to that?"

Developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg in the 1980s, SFBT is built on the premise that clients already have resources, strengths, and exceptions to their problems — and that therapy's job is to help them identify and amplify those existing capacities rather than excavate the roots of the difficulty.

Signature techniques include the "Miracle Question" (if you woke up tomorrow and the problem was gone, what would be different?), scaling questions (on a scale of 1–10, where are you today? What would a 6 look like?), and exploring exceptions (when was the last time things were slightly better? What was different then?). SFBT is time-limited by design — often 6–12 sessions — and is particularly well-suited to EAP contexts and clients with specific, concrete goals.

Somatic therapy is based on a recognition that the body is not simply a vessel that carries the mind around — it is an active participant in how we experience, store, and process difficult experiences. Trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk's foundational observation — that "the body keeps the score" — captures what somatic clinicians have long understood: that trauma and chronic stress leave traces in the nervous system, the musculature, the breath, and the physiological patterns of arousal and shutdown that standard talk therapy often cannot fully reach.

Somatic approaches bring awareness to bodily sensation, posture, breath, and physical impulse alongside verbal processing — not as a substitute for language, but as an additional channel of information and healing.

Polyvagal theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, provides the neurological framework underlying much of this work. The polyvagal model describes three states of the autonomic nervous system: the ventral vagal state (safety and social engagement), the sympathetic state (mobilization — fight or flight), and the dorsal vagal state (immobilization — shutdown or freeze). Understanding which state a client's nervous system is operating from in any given moment helps both therapist and client make sense of responses that might otherwise feel confusing, shameful, or out of control.

At Théla, polyvagal-informed principles are woven throughout our clinical approach — informing how we pace sessions, regulate co-regulation, and help clients build an internal sense of safety that is not dependent on external circumstances.

"Not all of these approaches are offered at Théla — but understanding them helps you become a more informed participant in your own care. If you've worked with a particular modality before, or read about one that resonates, bring it up with your therapist. The best therapy is always a collaboration."