What our Clients Say?

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has mindful awareness at its core. It helps us develop our psychological freedom and flexibility by focusing on the cultivation of six core processes that foster vital, values-centred living. 

These processes are:

• Fully connecting with the present moment
• Willingly feeling and accepting reality, inside and outside the self and letting go of the struggle to control 
• Being aware of the mind, noticing what it is doing and stepping back from thoughts 
• Gaining clarity about deeply held values
• Engaging in committed action related to  these values
• Regularly gaining perspective from the wisest part of your being – the observer, the witness, the transcendent self

ACT uses discussion, metaphor and experiential exercises that target these six processes and help you explore them fully. ACT training targets suffering instead of pain. It encourages you to honour difficult feelings as part of the human experience and helps you come to view them as a natural struggle with temporary but challenging internal experiences. The focus is less on egoic identity, self-esteem and confidence, and more on self-compassion, wisdom, and living creative and value-driven lives.

With ACT training you learn to commit to your life as it is now and respond to it in ways that reflect your authentic self. You practice keeping your focus on what is most important and surrendering to the natural ups and downs of life while building more workable patterns of behaviour.

At The Free Spirit Collective, ACT training happens individually and in groups. ACT group work, including day retreats, will be advertised on our website and run throughout the year.

Attachment represents positive feelings and an emotional bond felt toward another human being. Our first attachments are with our parents, caregivers and other family members. These attachments are relationships that influence the way we relate with ourselves, other intimate relationships and even our children.

When a child is upset, hurt or scared it turns to the person they are attached to, expecting to be comforted.  The child’s distress is a signal to that person to do something that comforts the child. Like all mammals, we too are programmed to instinctively respond in these situations.

With time and the act of repetition, the child’s experiences of being cared for are internalised. What this means is:

• The child who has been cared for starts to feel comforted just by thinking of the person it is attached to.
• The child is comforted from within, almost like they carry that person with them.
• We learn to manage our emotional states for ourselves, in ways that shaped our early environment and relationships
• This allows us to calm or comfort ourselves as adults whenever we feel upset, hurt or scared.

Our relationships with our parents or caregivers, influence:

• Our attachment styles (these may vary and change over time).
• How we deal with close relationships.

This is often most evident in:

• Situations that cause us pain.
• When there is a danger or fear of being abandoned.

The way we regulate attachment relationships has a significant impact on our lives.

When an attachment is disrupted by abuse, neglect, significant inconsistency, cold indifferent parents, over-involved parents etc., termed as insecure or disorganised attachments, a child struggles to develop a sense of safety and identity.  Insecure and disorganised attachment affects the development of a fragmented sense of self, emotion regulation abilities, impulsivity and ability to inhibit behaviour, hyper-vigilance for threat, hypo-arousal of the emotion processing centres limiting recognition and understanding of others' emotional states (limiting empathy), limited understanding and defensive avoidance of taking other people’s perspectives (theory of mind).

A child then develops coping mechanisms or defences to survive in an environment. These defences continue to remain, often causing problems because they are no longer relevant to the person's life.  This can lead to psychological, emotional and relational distress.

Therapy for CPTSD and other attachment trauma-related problems often requires more complex and integrative therapy due to the complexity of the problems that can arise.  Such therapy will often involve skills development to reduce physical or mental symptoms of distress and a focus on emotions and relationships.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is evidence-based psychotherapy. It is a structured approach that can help to address a range of psychological difficulties including depression and anxiety. The initial assessment for CBT requires information from the past but focuses on current concerns and what makes them persist, to develop therapeutic goals and plan treatment.   

CBT is a collaborative therapy that emphasizes working with your therapist to develop an understanding of the underlying patterns of thinking (automated negative thoughts), feeling and behaving that affect mood and functioning. By identifying these patterns, re-structuring, challenging and adapting the underlying thoughts and beliefs, you can be free to interact with your experiences in new and healthier ways.

CBT usually follows a 12-week structure. However, your therapist will help determine what is appropriate for you based on your needs. Often, your therapist may also give you a task to complete between sessions. Exercises may be focused either on a particular thought or thinking pattern or be more behavioural. 

While CBT provides an excellent evidence base for many presentations, it has also evolved from its initial inception into many therapies, known as “third-wave” cognitive behavioural therapies. These include Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behavioural Therapy and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. Your therapist may suggest one of these if found relevant to your concerns or needs.   

PTSD may be experienced by people who have been exposed to scary, dangerous or shocking events either directly or indirectly through people they are close to that are affected by such events or by being a first responder in such events.

A person with PTSD may experience some or all of the following:

• Frequent reminders of events through flashbacks, ruminative thoughts, and nightmares, often make the person feel like they are back in the same situation
• Tendency to avoid places, people, things or thoughts that might trigger memories of the event. Avoidance may take the form of suppression of feelings through addictive behaviours such as alcoholism.
• Increased anxiety
• Altered mood
• Some people with PTSD can struggle to continue living normal lives, while others may experience reduced enjoyment or performance in relationships and other activities. Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (Link to EMDR) and other somatic-focused therapies can be very effective in treating PTSD. Trauma Focused CBT is also found to be effective. Therapy combined with things like yoga, acupuncture, meditation, dance and other movement-based activities has also proven to be effective.

Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (complex PTSD, sometimes abbreviated to c-PTSD or CPTSD) is a condition where you experience some symptoms of PTSD along with additional symptoms like difficulty controlling your emotions and feeling extreme anger or distrust towards the world.

Complex PTSD may be diagnosed in adults or children that have repeatedly experienced traumatic events, such as violence, neglect or abuse.

Complex PTSD is thought to be more severe if:

• Traumatic events happened early in life.
• The trauma was caused by a parent or caregiver.
• The trauma was experienced for a long time.
• The person was alone during the trauma
• There’s still contact with the person responsible for the trauma

As it may take years for the symptoms of complex PTSD to be recognised, a child's development, including their behaviour and self-confidence, can be altered as they get older.

Adults with complex PTSD may lose their trust in people and feel separated from others.

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is a modified version of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Its goal is to teach people how to live in the moment, develop healthy ways of coping with stress, regulate their emotions, and improve their relationships with others.  It has mindfulness practice at its core and is primarily a skill-building approach to therapy.

DBT was originally used to treat Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) but has been adapted over time to treat other mental health conditions. It can help people with difficulty in emotional regulation or those exhibiting self-destructive behaviours, such as anxiety, panic, eating disorders and substance use disorders. This type of therapy is also sometimes used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

DBT has evolved into an evidence-based psychotherapy approach that is used to treat many conditions.

Different kinds of DBT include:

• Group therapy is where patients are taught behavioural skills in a group setting.
• Individual therapy with a trained professional is where a patient's behavioural skills are adapted to their life challenges.
• Phone coaching allows patients to call the therapist between sessions for guidance in coping with a difficult situation.

Some of the strategies and techniques that are used in DBT include:

• Mindfulness practice
• Distress Tolerance
• Emotion Regulation
• Interpersonal Effectiveness

Trained clinicians at The Free Spirit Collective provide DBT as individual therapy. Currently, we do not have any DBT group programs or coaching, though many of the skills and ideas are incorporated into other group therapy sessions.

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) treatment is designed to help with extreme emotional instability, which clinicians term as Dysregulation, known as the inability to manage intense emotions, often leading to impulsive, self-destructive or self-harming behaviour. The goal of DBT is to teach adolescents techniques that help them understand their emotions without judgment — the mindfulness component — and to give them skills and techniques to manage those emotions and change behaviours in ways that will make their lives better. However, it is a process that requires a fair about of work and commitment.

DBT is an intensive and structured kind of therapy that can help kids and teens who have a lot of trouble handling strong emotions. DBT works by combining two sets of skills. The first, called mindfulness, helps kids understand and accept difficult feelings. The second, a treatment called CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), teaches them how to change their feelings and behaviour.

DBT for adolescents includes one-on-one time with a therapist, group skills training as well as family therapy. Teens and their parents learn new skills together to help kids deal with hard feelings. In family therapy, parents and kids talk about home experiences, helping them relate to each other. 

DBT is used to treat everything from anxiety to depression, ADHD, bipolar disorder and eating disorders. It is often helpful for kids who have had trouble with other kinds of therapy.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a fairly new, non-traditional type of psychotherapy. It's growing in popularity, particularly for treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD can often occur after experiences such as military combat, physical or sexual assault or car accidents.

We do know that when a person is very upset, their brain cannot process information as it normally does due to high levels of distress causing the pre-frontal cortex to shut down. A moment can be frozen in time which can make remembering a trauma feel as bad as going through it the first time, because the images, sounds, smells, and feelings associated with it haven’t changed. Such memories have a lasting negative effect on how a person sees the world and relates to other people.

EMDR seems to have a direct impact on the way that our brain processes information. It allows the prefrontal cortex to remain ‘online’ so our brain can resume processing information normally. Following a successful EMDR session, a person no longer relives the images, sounds and feelings associated with an event when they think of it. They still remember what happened, but it is less upsetting. Although many types of therapy have similar goals, EMDR appears to be similar to what occurs naturally during dreaming or REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. Thus, EMDR can be thought of as a physiologically based therapy that helps a person see disturbing material in a new and less distressing way.

Holistic Coaching is an individualised and action-focused approach to physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual flourishing. It does not focus on mental and emotional symptom reduction,  but rather on co-developing strategies and utilising healing techniques aimed at helping you grow and thrive.