What Type of Therapy Is Right for Me?

“We cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.” - Carl Rogers

Choosing a therapist is one of the few important decisions people make with almost no information. The names are unfamiliar, the descriptions all sound benign, and the person you are asking to help you decide is usually one of the people you are choosing between.

So here is an honest map of the main approaches: what each actually does, who each tends to suit, and where mine sits among them.

First, the thing nobody says

Most people choosing a therapy are not really choosing a theory. They are trying to work out whether they will be able to bear it.

And the research is fairly consistent, in a way that is slightly awkward for everyone selling a method: across the talking therapies, the relationship between the two people predicts the outcome better than the approach does. That does not make the approaches interchangeable - they genuinely differ in what they do and who they suit, and the rest of this piece is about those differences. But it does mean the school matters less than the fit.

So the useful way to read what follows is not “which of these is best” but “which of these sounds like something I could actually do, with someone I could actually talk to.”

Humanistic therapy

When it helps: you want warmth, acceptance, and room to explore what things mean, rather than a protocol.

Humanistic therapy emerged in the mid-twentieth century as an alternative to purely medical and psychoanalytic models. Carl Rogers and Rollo May put empathy, authenticity and the person’s own drive toward growth at the centre of it. Instead of focusing on pathology, it invites you to explore feelings, choices and meaning in the present.

The family includes Person-Centred therapy, Gestalt, Existential therapy and compassion-focused work. I have seen how much simply being met this way can shift a person - there is a relational foundation here that a great deal of healing rests on.

“When a person realises he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, ‘Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it’s like to be me.’” - Carl Rogers

It suits people who want a collaborative relationship and who value their own agency in it. If self-criticism is part of what brings you, working with the harsh inner critic goes further into that.

Psychodynamic and analytical therapy

When it helps: you want to understand how your early life is shaping the present, not just manage what it produces.

Rooted in Freud and Jung, these approaches explore unconscious patterns, family dynamics and the images that recur in a life. I often find them most useful for people who sense that something old is running the show and want to know what it is rather than only how to cope with it.

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” - C.G. Jung

If the spiritual dimension is not what you are after, this is depth work without it.

Somatic and trauma-focused therapy

When it helps: what troubles you lives in your body as much as your thoughts.

Trauma tends to lodge in the body, something I have come to appreciate more and more over the years. Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and other body-oriented approaches work directly with what is held physically, rather than approaching it only through talk.

“Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” - Gabor Maté

If trauma recovery specifically is what brings you here, these may be exactly right - and they combine well with everything else on this page. I have written separately about a transpersonal approach to healing trauma, and about the earliest wounding of all.

CBT, DBT and EMDR

When it helps: you want practical tools, a defined course, and measurable change in a specific pattern.

Evidence-based treatments such as CBT, DBT and EMDR are genuinely valuable. For someone who needs tools to manage anxiety, interrupt a specific unhelpful pattern, or stabilise during a crisis, they can be exactly right - and they are often what insurers and the NHS will fund. CBT in particular is NICE-recommended for generalised anxiety and panic disorder, and I say so plainly because it is true.

Their focus is deliberately narrow: changing thoughts, managing behaviour, building skills. What they do not set out to do is ask the other question - not how do I manage this, but who am I becoming underneath it.

This is where the honest answer is that it depends what you came for. If your goal is symptom-specific, structured work is the efficient route and I would say so rather than sell you something longer.

Transpersonal therapy

When it helps: the questions that brought you are not only clinical - meaning, purpose, spirit, what a life is for.

Transpersonal work goes beyond the personal and the practical, treating crises of meaning as gateways rather than pathologies. It emerged in the mid-twentieth century through Abraham Maslow and Roberto Assagioli, who founded psychosynthesis, and it holds that psychology should include our higher capacities as well as our injuries: creativity, love, joy, and the will to meaning.

It also insists that a person is never only their own private difficulty. Assagioli wrote of the “intricate economic and social machinery… within which [man] is enmeshed… mak[ing] ever more insistent demands on his energy, his mental functions, his emotions, and his will.” Which matters practically: much of what people arrive carrying as personal failure turns out to belong to systems, families and generations rather than to them.

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own soul.” - C.G. Jung

The family includes Jungian analysis, psychosynthesis, Buddhist psychology, mindfulness, and archetypal and mythopoetic work. When a period of upheaval feels like both at once, spiritual awakening or breakdown is about telling them apart.

Integrative therapy, and where psychosynthesis sits

When it helps: you suspect you need more than one of the above, which most people do.

An integrative therapist draws from several traditions and tailors the work to the person rather than fitting the person to a model. It is the honest response to the fact that difficulty rarely arrives in one category.

Psychosynthesis, which is what I trained in, is integrative by design rather than by improvisation. Assagioli built it as a frame capable of holding humanistic, psychodynamic, existential and transpersonal work together - which is why almost everything above can happen inside it without being borrowed. If you want the full account, what psychosynthesis is and why Assagioli left Freud explains where it came from.

“The purpose of psychosynthesis is not to destroy any part of ourselves, but to integrate these parts into a unified whole.” - Piero Ferrucci

That flexibility is the point, not a hedge. It means I can work with whatever actually serves the person in front of me, under an umbrella broad enough to hold it, rather than applying a procedure and hoping you fit.

So where does it sit, against the five above?

Humanistic: the same ground entirely. The same regard for the person, the same trust that they are already moving somewhere. Rogers is in the room.

Psychodynamic and analytical: the unconscious taken just as seriously, and Jung’s influence is direct rather than borrowed. The difference is that this looks forward as well as back - at what has not been lived yet, as well as what was buried.

Somatic: the body treated as a source of information rather than a symptom to be settled. But for dedicated trauma protocols I would refer you to someone who does that specifically.

CBT and DBT: this is the slower route. Where they change what you do, this asks what the doing is for. If your goal is one clear pattern interrupted in eight weeks, they are the better tool and I would tell you so rather than keep you.

Transpersonal: one of the founding traditions of it, and a grounded one. Assagioli was a psychiatrist before he was anything else, and it shows.

The short version: psychosynthesis is not a sixth option sitting next to the other five. It is the frame I use to work out which of the five the hour in front of me actually needs.

How to actually decide

Four questions worth sitting with, which will narrow it faster than any amount of reading:

• What do you want? Relief from a specific symptom, or something broader - growth, meaning, a different relationship with yourself. Both are legitimate. They point different ways.
• How do you want the hour to feel? Structured, with exercises and a plan. Or open, following whatever surfaces.
• Does it need to be measurable? Insurance and some employers require evidence-based protocols. Worth checking before you fall in love with an approach.
• Does the therapy have room for what matters to you? If your beliefs, your culture, your creative life or your spiritual practice are central, a therapy with no space for them will quietly convert them into symptoms and treat those instead.

Underneath all four sits something simpler. Therapy works when a person feels genuinely met - not assessed, not categorised, not handled. Many people arrive having spent a lifetime not being seen properly, and being treated as an object in the consulting room on top of that can do real harm.

“Every person born into the world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique.” - Martin Buber

Buber called this the I-Thou encounter: meeting another person as a person rather than as a case. It is the oldest idea on this page and still the one that decides whether any of the rest works.

Why this matters more than it used to

The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has described our age as dominated by one way of attending to the world: analytic, controlling, efficient, and disconnected from meaning. In The Master and His Emissary he argues that the more relational, embodied ways of knowing have been steadily crowded out.

You do not have to accept the neuroscience to recognise the culture. Most people I see are not short of information about themselves. They are short of somewhere to be a whole person for an hour.

How I work

I trained at the Psychosynthesis and Education Trust and I am a registered member of the BACP, where you can check my registration. Forty years of Buddhist practice sit behind the clinical training, alongside a career in the arts and years of running men’s, youth and community groups.

In practice the work is relational, integrative and grounded. I draw on humanistic, Jungian, Gestalt, existential and trauma-informed approaches as they are useful, and I follow your process rather than a programme - what actually happens in a session describes the hour itself, if that is the part you are wondering about. My aim is not only to help with symptoms but to make a space where relief and meaning can arrive together.

“The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.” - Rollo May

If you would like to talk it through before deciding anything, there is a free fifteen-minute call. It is easier to judge a voice than a web page - and if what you need is something I do not offer, I will say so and point you toward it.

If you want to go further on any of these

Each of the approaches above has a fuller piece behind it on this site:

• Psychosynthesis - what it is, and why Assagioli left Freud, and what actually happens in a session
• Anxiety and the inner critic - what anxiety is protecting, and conscious kindness as a response to it
• Depression - what depression might be trying to tell you
• Trauma and early wounding - a transpersonal approach to trauma, and the primal wound
• Spirituality - awakening or breakdown, and spiritual bypassing
• Starting out - therapy for the first time

Further reading

• Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
• Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy and The Gift of Therapy
• Roberto Assagioli, Psychosynthesis: A Collection of Basic Writings
• Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
• Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
• James Hillman, The Soul’s Code

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main difference between humanistic and transpersonal counselling?
Humanistic counselling focuses on personal growth and self-actualisation, while transpersonal counselling includes spiritual exploration and experiences that go beyond the individual ego.

How do I know what type of therapy is right for me?
Reflect on your goals, cultural or spiritual needs, and the kind of therapeutic relationship you want. Many people meet with one or two therapists for an initial consultation before deciding. An integrative therapist can adapt multiple approaches to suit you.