While group therapy and couples counseling have their beneficial uses, when you want focused attention, then individual counseling may suit your needs better. The focus stays on you and your problems the entire counseling session so you make progress toward the goals you have set for your recovery from depression, anxiety, or other life problem. Here are some options available in individual counseling.

Talk Therapy

Sometimes, talking to a trained counselor does the most good. This releases some of the burden of carrying a secret or problem all by yourself. Plus, hearing yourself describe the problem can put it into another perspective. A counselor helps you identify a problem, examine it, and look at ways to deal with it. Talk therapy can help with depression, grief, and even addiction.

Talking therapy can get to the root of your problems even if they began years ago as a child. This is all done in a safe and non-threatening environment so you feel free to open up and explore your feelings. Talk therapy could be as short as a few sessions over a few months, or it could go one for a few years depending on your needs.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is usually a short-term type of counseling that has a specific goal. This type of counseling helps with problems such as depression, anxiety, stress, and addiction. It also helps with specific issues such as fear of flying or fear of the dark. The goal of the therapy is to change the way you look at events. You're led to understand that it's your thoughts about an event or thing that cause your fear and not the thing itself. Once the fear is pinpointed, then you can use various methods to overcome it by replacing frightening thoughts with thoughts that don't make you fearful or depressed.

Hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy is sometimes used in an individual counseling session. It might be used to help you recover a memory or to help you overcome a problem. If you want to stop smoking, quit drinking, or change some other behavior, then hypnotherapy might be able to help because the therapist offers suggestions during the hypnotic state that help you build new habits that override bad ones. Hypnotherapy can be used alone, but it is also effective when used with talk therapy when you need to get at the root of the reasons you drink alcohol, overeat, or have another detrimental habit.

These are three basic approaches used in individual counseling sessions, but there are many other approaches a therapist might use. You may find talk therapy to be the most effective and easiest to begin. Once you start sorting out your issues, then your therapist might suggest additional treatments that provide deeper help.