It may look like a craft class, but art therapy is a serious technique that uses the creative process to help improve the mental health of clients. Art therapy can be used on children and adults to treat a wide range of emotional issues, including anxiety, depression, family and relationship problems, abuse and domestic violence, and trauma and loss. Commonly found in hospitals and community centers, art therapy programs are based on the belief that the creative process is healing and life-enhancing. As they paint or draw, a skilled therapist can use the client's works of art and their approach to the process as springboards to help them gain personal insight, improve their judgment, cope with stress, and work through traumatic experiences.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy stresses the role of thinking in how we feel and what we do. It is based on the belief that thoughts, rather than people or events, cause our negative feelings. The therapist assists the client in identifying, testing the reality of, and correcting dysfunctional beliefs underlying his or her thinking. The therapist then helps the client modify those thoughts and the behaviors that flow from them. CBT is a structured collaboration between therapist and client and often calls for homework assignments. CBT has been clinically proven to help clients in a relatively short amount of time with a wide range of disorders, including depression and anxiety.

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is an evidence-based therapy for PTSD. It targets maladaptive thoughts linked to trauma. It usually involves around 12 sessions and will include at-home work, like writing about the traumatic event. CPT aims to change thoughts around safety, trust, control, esteem, and intimacy. It helps develop skills to challenge and restructure thoughts, leading to healthier perspective, coping, and recovery from PTSD.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is the treatment most closely associated with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Therapists practice DBT in both individual and group sessions. The therapy combines elements of CBT to help with regulating emotion through distress tolerance and mindfulness. The goal of Dialectical Behavior Therapy is to alleviate the intense emotional pain associated with BPD.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is an information processing therapy that helps clients cope with trauma, addictions, and phobias. During this treatment, the patient focuses on a specific thought, image, emotion, or sensation while simultaneously watching the therapist's finger or baton move in front of his or her eyes. The client is told to recognize what comes up for him/her when thinking of an image; then the client is told to let it go while doing bilateral stimulation. It's like being on a train; an emotion or a thought may come up and the client lets it pass as though they were looking out the window of the moving train.

Experiential therapy is a therapeutic technique that uses expressive tools and activities, such as role-playing or acting, props, arts and crafts, music, animal care, guided imagery, or various forms of recreation to re-enact and re-experience emotional situations from past and recent relationships. The client focuses on the activities and, through the experience, begins to identify emotions associated with success, disappointment, responsibility, and self-esteem. Under the guidance of a trained experiential therapist, the client can begin to release and explore negative feelings of anger, hurt, or shame as they relate to past experiences that may have been blocked or still linger.

Expressive arts therapy is the use of the creative arts as a form of therapy on the basis that people can heal through use of imagination and creativity. Expressive arts therapy would include art therapy, dance therapy, drama therapy, music therapy and writing therapy.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an approach to psychotherapy that identifies and addresses multiple sub-personalities or families within each person’s mental system. These sub-personalities consist of wounded parts and painful emotions such as anger and shame, and parts that try to control and protect the person from the pain of the wounded parts. The sub-personalities are often in conflict with each other and with one’s core Self, a concept that describes the confident, compassionate, whole person that is at the core of every individual. IFS focuses on healing the wounded parts and restoring mental balance and harmony by changing the dynamics that create discord among the sub-personalities and the Self.

For clients with chronic pain, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, and other health issues such as anxiety and depression, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT, is a two-part therapy that aims to reduce stress, manage pain, and embrace the freedom to respond to situations by choice. MCBT blends two disciplines--cognitive therapy and mindfulness. Mindfulness helps by reflecting on moments and thoughts without passing judgment. MBCT clients pay close attention to their feelings to reach an objective mindset, thus viewing and combating life's unpleasant occurrences.

Person-centered therapy uses a non-authoritative approach that allows clients to take more of a lead in discussions so that, in the process, they will discover their own solutions. The therapist acts as a compassionate facilitator, listening without judgment and acknowledging the client's experience without moving the conversation in another direction. The therapist is there to encourage and support the client and to guide the therapeutic process without interrupting or interfering with the client's process of self-discovery.

Psychodynamic therapy, also known as insight-oriented therapy, evolved from Freudian psychoanalysis. Like adherents of psychoanalysis, psychodynamic therapists believe that bringing the unconscious into conscious awareness promotes insight and resolves conflict. But psychodynamic therapy is briefer and less intensive than psychoanalysis and also focuses on the relationship between the therapist and the client, as a way to learn about how the client relates to everyone in their life.

Sandplay therapy establishes a safe and protected space, where the complexities of the client's inner world can be explored. Often young children, clients place miniature figurines in a small sandbox to express confusing feelings and inner experiences. This creates a visual representation of the client's thoughts and feelings and can reveal unconscious concerns that are inaccessible. The therapist does not interpret, interfere with, or direct the client's sand play but maintains an attitude of receptivity and acceptance, so the client can bring unconscious material into consciousness without censure.

Strength-based therapy is a type of positive psychotherapy and counseling that focuses more on your internal strengths and resourcefulness, and less on weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings. This focus sets up a positive mindset that helps you build on you best qualities, find your strengths, improve resilience and change worldview to one that is more positive. A positive attitude, in turn, can help your expectations of yourself and others become more reasonable.

Trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) helps people who may be experiencing post-traumatic stress after a traumatic event to return to a healthy state.