Which Type of Therapy Is Right for Me?

Finding the right therapist is an important step in your mental health journey, but equally important is finding the type of therapy that’s the right fit for you. With so many approaches and acronyms in the therapy landscape, it’s completely understandable to feel unsure about where to begin.

This guide offers an introduction to some commonly used therapy approaches, including how they work and who they can help. While each modality offers a unique path to healing, all can be helpful depending on your personal goals and preferences.

In CBT, the focus is less on the event itself, and more on how we interpret it. When you learn to identify and challenge unhelpful thoughts (called negative self-talk), you can begin to build healthier thinking patterns and improve your emotional well-being.

CBT can be especially helpful for high-achieving, driven people who feel pressure to stay in control – even if their confidence only appears on the outside. If you’re a high-level executive, attorney, physician, or new mom – all roles that carry “do it all” expectations – CBT offers practical tools to manage stress, challenge self-doubt, and help you feel more grounded. 

If you’ve ever felt like you have to hold it all together on the outside – while quietly battling perfectionism, imposter syndrome, or self-doubt on the inside – you’re not alone. You might even feel guilty or ashamed for struggling at all, especially when things look fine from the outside.

CBT, especially when combined with self-compassion, can help you recognize and gently challenge those harsh inner critics, and begin to replace them with more supportive, realistic, and kind self-talk. Working with a CBT-oriented therapist can help you shift your internal experience to match the capable, confident person others already see in you.

ACT is an evolution of CBT that emphasizes psychological flexibility, which is the ability to stay present, accept what’s outside your control, and take action that is guided by your values. Rather than pushing away painful thoughts or feelings, ACT helps you relate to them differently, so they don’t hold you back from living a meaningful life.

Consider the difficult situations faced by those in healthcare. Physicians must sometimes make impossible decisions with long-lasting consequences for their patients, and they feel the weight of those decisions, too. This kind of hurt – often called moral injury – can arise when system constraints keep you from providing the care you know is right, or when harm occurs despite your best efforts. The feelings that follow, such as grief, guilt, shame, and anger, can be heavy and isolating. If this resonates, it’s understandable given the circumstances and it’s okay to not be okay.

ACT offers a compassionate, practical path forward. It helps you make room for tough emotions instead of avoiding or fighting them. It teaches you how to assign value and meaning to difficult events, and reconnect with what matters most to you. With practice, you can move forward by being gentle with yourself and others, so healing becomes possible while you continue the work you care about.

Exposure-based therapies help you reduce anxiety by facing feared situations in small, manageable steps – safely and with support. You and your therapist set the pace and walk through each step together. Instead of avoiding triggers, you’ll learn coping tools and over time, build confidence as you realize you can handle things that once felt overwhelming or anxiety-provoking.

Common types include:

• Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) – often used to treat obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and related concerns. OCD is more than the TV stereotype of excessive handwashing or counting. While those can be part of it, many compulsions are invisible – like mental checking, repeating phrases, or seeking reassurance. OCD also involves obsessions, which are repeated, unwanted thoughts or images. Whether symptoms are visible or not, they can cause significant anguish, and many people – including first responders – experienced an increase in symptoms during the pandemic. The good news: help is available. ERP addresses both obsessions and compulsions so you can regain a sense of control.
• Prolonged Exposure (PE) or Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) – evidence-based therapies for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). People with PTSD often avoid reminders of the trauma. While this can bring short-term relief, it often maintains symptoms and can delay recovery. Using PE or CPT, your therapist will guide you through a process of gently revisiting what happened – either by talking or writing – and exploring its impact on your life. If you’re carrying survivor’s guilt, self-blame, or a belief that the world is entirely unsafe, working with a professional therapist trained in PE and CPT can help you feel safer in your body and regain a greater sense of control in your life and emotions.
• Exposure work for panic or phobias helps you face your fears in small, doable steps. Instead of jumping into the hardest situation, you start with something small and manageable. For claustrophobia, for example, this might start with a brief virtual-reality “small room” exercise, then gradually work up to standing near an elevator and riding one floor, while learning coping skills along the way – until your body learns, “I can handle this.”

These types of therapies are highly effective – especially for anxiety-related concerns – and are designed to help you build confidence and resilience in the face of fear. Success in therapy often depends on working collaboratively with your therapist, so be sure to communicate openly about what’s helping, what isn’t, and the pace that feels right for you.

This traditional “talk therapy” approach focuses on why you feel and react the way you do. It examines how your past experiences, relationships, and unconscious patterns influence the present. With your therapist, you’ll gently explore how your emotional defenses developed – often because they were necessary at the time – and notice where they may no longer be serving you. The goal isn’t to blame the past, but to understand it so you can have more choice in the present.

If you work in an academic or research setting, you might be used to solving problems with logic and data. When your emotional responses aren’t “logical,” it can be confusing or frustrating. Insight-oriented therapy helps connect the dots between past experiences and current triggers, and helps you better manage your reactions. 

This therapy can be brief or open-ended and is often blended with other approaches like CBT or ACT. It may be a good fit if you keep running into the same conflicts at work or in relationships, feel stuck in self-criticism, have difficulty coping with perfectionism, want to understand strong reactions that seem out of proportion, or are ready to explore how your history shapes today’s choices and emotions.

In IPT, the relationship you build with your therapist is an important part of the process. Together, you’ll create a safe, supportive space where you can be open and honest, which gives you a practice ground for intimacy, trust, and healthy communication. When it’s clinically helpful, your therapist may offer limited, relevant self-disclosure like sharing an aspect of their personal journey to model a skill or normalize an experience, always within professional boundaries. This connection helps you feel truly understood and cared for, and it gives you the confidence to strengthen your relationships outside of the therapy room by building effective communication skills – including knowing how and when to say, “I’m sorry.”

IPT can help you build healthier relationships with family, friends, or a partner, and strengthen your ability to lead and collaborate – even in high-stress environments – through effective communication and the power of validation.

If you’ve recently lost someone or are navigating other life changes, IPT can help you process your grief, and stay present with the people who matter. Over time, many people find that IPT helps them feel more connected, more effective in their relationships, and more capable of learning how to be happy again after a loss.

Mindfulness encourages you to slow down, stay present, and observe your thoughts and feelings without judgment. While it’s sometimes dismissed as a wellness fad, research shows that mindfulness can change how the brain responds to stress, improve emotional regulation, and help prevent relapse in depression. With guidance from a trained therapist, these skills can be integrated into therapy or practiced on your own through meditation, breathwork, and body awareness. It may feel challenging at first, but a trained therapist will guide you in building these skills – often starting as simply as using your five senses to notice what you can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste.

Even mental health providers benefit from mindfulness. Burnout is common among therapists, who regularly sit with traumatic stories during sessions with their clients. In fact, 40% of mental health professionals report emotional exhaustion, a key component of burnout. Approaches like Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) can help clinicians manage their mood, anxiety, and stress.

Mindfulness also supports people in high-stress roles, like active-duty service members and aviators who need to stay alert, as well as caregivers caring for a sick or dying loved one. These practices – especially when used over time – can steady attention, create a pause between stimulus and response, and bring moments of calm into demanding days.

Relaxation skills are often used alongside other therapies to help manage symptoms and improve overall wellness. These might include:

• Deep breathing to calm the nervous system
• Guided imagery/visualization to reduce stress
• Body scanning to promote mind-body awareness

These techniques are simple, easy to learn, can be practiced anywhere, and are designed for everyday life. With regular practice, they can become reliable tools to help you feel more grounded and resilient – small steps that add up over time.

Integrated therapy weaves together a variety of tools, from traditional talk therapy to mindfulness, breathwork, and body-based practices. This approach sees you as a whole person, not just a diagnosis, and helps connect the mind, body, and emotions in the healing process.

A session might include guided meditation, gentle movement, or somatic (body-based) awareness exercises. This can be especially supportive if you’ve experienced trauma or want a more holistic path to healing.

• Neurofeedback: Neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback that uses electroencephalogram (EEG) technology to map brain activity and train more controlled brainwave patterns, which may help reduce stress, stabilize mood, and improve clarity.
• Art Therapy: Art therapy uses the creative process to help you express your thoughts and emotions nonverbally. It can make exploring complex feelings or trauma feel safer and less overwhelming.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to therapy. What works best for you will depend on your goals, preferences, history, and readiness for change. A skilled therapist will collaborate with you to find – or thoughtfully combine – approaches that meet you where you are and support where you want to go.

If you’re unsure where to start, that’s okay. You can learn more about how therapy works and what to expect or ask your therapist for guidance. Reach out to our team at Therapy Changes for more information and to request an appointment.