Therapeutic Modalities We Use
Our therapists are trained in a wide range of evidence-based approaches. These may be used individually or in combination, depending on your needs, goals, and stage of therapy.
Cognitive & Behavioural Approaches
These approaches focus on understanding patterns of thought, emotion, and behaviour, and developing skills that support emotional regulation, flexibility, and meaningful action.
Schema therapy is an integrative approach that brings together elements of CBT, attachment theory, and emotion-focused work to address the deep, long-standing patterns, called schemas, that form early in life and shape how we see ourselves and relate to others. It’s particularly suited to difficulties that haven’t fully responded to shorter-term work, helping people recognize self-defeating patterns and build healthier ways of meeting their core emotional needs.
Read more: International Society of Schema Therapy
Trauma-Focused & Nervous System Approaches
These approaches support healing by helping the nervous system process overwhelming or unresolved experiences in a safe, paced way.
Sensorimotor psychotherapy is a body-inclusive approach to trauma and attachment that treats the body as a direct source of information, not just the mind. It pays attention to posture, movement, and physical sensation alongside thoughts and emotions, helping people notice and gently shift the survival responses that trauma can leave held in the body, integrating somatic, emotional, and cognitive processing.
Read more: Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute
Prolonged Exposure is one of the most thoroughly researched treatments specifically for PTSD. Working gradually and with support, you revisit trauma memories and the situations you’ve been avoiding, so the nervous system can learn, at its own pace, that these reminders are no longer the threat they once felt like. Over time, the memories lose their power to overwhelm, and avoidance loosens its hold on daily life.
Read more: American Psychological Association — PTSD treatments
Accelerated Resolution Therapy is an evidence-based approach that uses guided eye movements to help the brain change how distressing images and memories are stored, so they no longer trigger strong physical and emotional reactions. It draws on techniques from several established therapies and is often brief and many people experience meaningful relief within a small number of sessions.
Read more: Accelerated Resolution Therapy
Relational, Attachment & Systems-Based Approaches
These models focus on relationships, attachment patterns, and emotional connection as central to healing and change.
Family systems therapy understands a family as an emotional unit — when one part of the system shifts, the change ripples through the whole. Rather than locating a problem in one person, it looks at the patterns, roles, and interactions that develop over time, often running on autopilot. A neutral therapist helps the family see what’s working and what isn’t, and find new ways to support one another.
Read more: The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family
Insight, Meaning & Narrative Approaches
These approaches explore how past experiences, identity, values, power, and meaning shape present-day emotional life.
Psychodynamic therapy is depth-oriented, insight-focused work. It looks at how earlier experiences and out-of-awareness patterns continue to shape your present relationships, choices, and inner life. By bringing those patterns into view, the work helps you understand where they came from, which is frequently what allows them to begin to shift.
Read more: American Psychoanalytic Association
Existential therapy engages with the larger questions that surface in difficult times, such as meaning, freedom, choice, mortality, and how to live authentically. Rather than treating these as symptoms to remove, it takes them seriously as part of being human, helping you face uncertainty honestly and live in a way that feels true to your own values.
Feminist therapy understands that personal distress is often shaped by social context — by power, inequality, and the roles and expectations placed on us. It pays attention to how these forces affect mental health, works to balance the therapeutic relationship rather than position the therapist as the sole authority, and supports clients in moving toward both personal change and a clearer sense of their own worth and voice.
Spiritually-integrated psychotherapy recognizes that spirituality, whether expressed through religion or not, is, for many people, a meaningful thread running through their lives. Therapists working this way are open to conversations about your spirituality, can help you consider its role in both your struggles and your sources of strength, and support you in drawing on those resources in difficult times.
Person-centered therapy rests on a deep trust in your own capacity to grow and find your way forward. The therapist offers genuine, non-judgmental presence and careful listening, following your lead rather than directing the conversation. Within that supportive relationship, many people find the clarity and confidence to move toward their own solutions.
Mindfulness, Body & Expressive Approaches
These approaches integrate awareness, creativity, and embodied experience to support regulation and expression.
MBCT combines the structure of cognitive therapy with mindfulness practices such as meditation and breath awareness. It was developed especially to help people prone to recurring depression by teaching them to recognize the early signs of a downward spiral — rumination, harsh self-talk — and to respond with awareness rather than getting pulled under. The skills are also widely helpful for stress and anxiety.
Read more: Access MBCT
Hakomi is a mindfulness-based, body-centred approach to self-exploration and change. It works from the idea that the body offers a window into beliefs and patterns held outside of everyday awareness. In a state of relaxed, mindful attention, you and your therapist gently study what surfaces — your sensations, emotions, memories — so that long-held beliefs can be brought into awareness and healing can unfold.
Read more: Hakomi Institute
Integrative body psychotherapy is a holistic approach that works with the relationship between body and mind. It supports awareness of physical experience — sensation, breath, the felt sense of being in your body — as a path to self-understanding and healing, and can be helpful for a range of concerns including anxiety, depression, and the physical effects of stress.
Emotional Freedom Technique, often called “tapping,” is sometimes described as acupressure for the emotions. While focusing on a distressing memory or feeling, you tap on a sequence of points on the body. It’s used as a self-soothing and emotion-regulation tool to help reduce stress and process difficult feelings, and is generally offered as one technique within a broader therapy rather than a standalone treatment.
Art therapy uses the process of making art, including drawing, painting, sculpting, or collage, as a way to express and explore what can be hard to put into words. Guided by the therapist, the focus is on the process and meaning rather than artistic skill, offering a different route into emotions and experiences and a way to make sense of them.
Read more: Canadian Art Therapy Association
Dance/movement therapy uses movement and attention to the body to support emotional, cognitive, physical, and social wellbeing. As a body-based approach, it offers a way to process experience non-verbally and can build self-awareness, emotional expression, and a stronger sense of connection to oneself and others.
Read more: American Dance Therapy Association
Motivational & Strength-Based Approaches
These approaches emphasize strengths, readiness for change, and practical steps forward.
Compassion-focused therapy is designed for situations where the inner voice has become harsh, critical, or shaming. Rather than arguing with that voice, it helps you build a kinder, steadier one alongside it, drawing on our capacity for self-compassion to ease distress. Research consistently finds that self-compassion calms the nervous system and reduces suffering more effectively than self-criticism.
Read more: Self Compassion Institute
Therapy is not one-size-fits-all
At River’s Edge Counselling Centre, we use a wide range of evidence-based therapeutic approaches because meaningful change does not happen in only one way. People change through insight, emotional experience, relational connection, skill-building, nervous system regulation, and shifts in meaning—often in combination, and often over time.
Working with the whole person
Human beings are complex. Our thoughts, emotions, relationships, bodies, personal histories, and sense of meaning are constantly interacting. When one part of this system shifts, it can influence the others. Effective therapy recognizes this complexity and responds with flexibility rather than a single, fixed method.
A grounded, client-centred foundation
Across all therapeutic approaches, our work is grounded in care that is person-centred and trauma-informed. This means therapy is collaborative and respectful of your lived experience, attentive to safety and pacing, and guided by an understanding of how stress, trauma, and emotional pain can shape the nervous system and relationships.
These foundations shape how therapy is offered, regardless of the specific modalities being used.
What this means for you as a client
Rather than asking you to fit a particular therapy model, our approach is to adapt therapy to you. Your therapist works collaboratively with you to understand what supports change in your life, at your pace, and in ways that feel meaningful and sustainable.
You do not need to understand therapy models to begin counselling. Many clients arrive without any familiarity with modalities at all—and that’s completely okay. Part of our role is to guide the process and ensure you are supported by a therapist who can meet you where you are, using evidence-based approaches with flexibility and care.
At the same time, some clients come in with prior experience, recommendations, or curiosity about particular approaches. If that’s true for you, this page offers an overview of the therapeutic modalities our therapists are trained in, and how they may be used as part of an integrative, client-centred process.
What Do We Mean by “Therapeutic Orientation” or “Modality”?
A therapeutic orientation (sometimes called a modality) refers to a framework that helps therapists understand how people develop, how emotional or relational difficulties arise, and how therapeutic change can occur.
You might think of a therapist’s orientation as their clinical home base. It can influence:
- How challenges are understood and framed
- How therapy is structured and paced
- How change is supported (for example, through insight, skill-building, emotional processing, body-based work, or meaning-making)
- The types of tools and interventions that may be suggested
Most therapists have one or two primary orientations, alongside additional training in complementary approaches. These orientations guide clinical thinking, while still allowing flexibility in how therapy is offered.
Why We Work Integratively
Change happens through multiple pathways
Human change is rarely linear and rarely confined to a single domain. Some changes occur through understanding and reframing patterns of thought. Others emerge through emotional experience, relational safety, or learning new ways to respond to stress. For many people, meaningful change also involves the body, memory, identity, and the stories they carry about themselves and the world.
An integrative approach allows therapy to evolve
Because change can unfold in different ways at different times, our therapists work integratively. This means they draw thoughtfully from multiple therapeutic approaches rather than applying one model rigidly.
At various points in therapy, the work may involve:
- Cognitive exploration and skill-building
- Emotional processing and regulation
- Relational or attachment-based work
- Somatic or nervous system–focused approaches Narrative, identity, or values-based exploration
An integrative approach allows therapy to respond to how change is actually happening for you, adjusting as new insights, needs, or goals emerge.
Flexibility as a clinical responsibility
Working integratively is not about doing “a bit of everything.” It is about clinical responsiveness – using professional judgment, evidence-based methods, and collaboration to support change in a way that fits the client, rather than forcing the client into a predetermined framework.
Finding the Right Fit
Research consistently shows that a safe, trusting therapeutic relationship is one of the strongest predictors of positive outcomes in counselling. When helping you find a therapist, we consider:
- Your goals, concerns, and preferences
- Your past experiences with counselling (if any)
- Therapist expertise and clinical focus
- Personality, pace, and working style
- Therapeutic orientation and flexibility
Some clients come in knowing they are interested in a particular approach. Others have no idea where to begin—and both are completely valid. You do not need to choose a modality to start counselling. Our role is to help guide the process and support you in finding a therapist who feels like a good fit.
* You can also explore therapist profiles on our Meet the Team page and filter by therapeutic approaches if that’s helpful.
Frequently Asked Questions About Therapeutic Approaches
No. Many clients begin therapy without any knowledge of modalities. Your therapist will guide the process and adapt the work to what’s most helpful for you.
No. Therapists at River’s Edge work integratively, drawing from multiple evidence-based approaches as therapy unfolds.
Yes. If you have experience with or interest in a particular modality, we’re happy to take that into account when matching you with a therapist.
That’s very common. Therapy itself is a collaborative process of discovering what supports change for you.
Different approaches can be helpful for different people and concerns. Research shows that the quality of the therapeutic relationship and a flexible, responsive approach are key factors in effective therapy.