The term "psychotherapy" refers to a broad range of practices, techniques, theories and perspectives. It is difficult to define because there are literally hundreds of different types of practices that all call themselves psychotherapy. treatment for psychological, emotional, or behaviour disorders in which a trained person establishes a relationship with one or several patients for the purpose of modifying or removing existing symptoms and promoting personality growth.

Psychotherapy is a way of helping people to overcome stress, emotional problems, relationship problems or troublesome habits. What they have in common is that they are all treatments based on talking to another person and sometimes doing things together.

Psychotherapy usually involves regular meetings at the same time, same place every week or two weeks. In a group therapy, several people with similar sorts of problems may meet regularly with a therapist or therapists.

There are few types of Psychotherapy:

Psychodynamic psychotherapy
Behavioural psychotherapy
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Family and Marital Therapy

Psychodynamic psychotherapy - focuses on the feelings we have about other people, especially our family and those we are close to. Treatment involves discussing past experiences and how these may have led to our present situation and also how these past experiences may be affecting our life now. The understanding gained frees the person to make choices about what happens in the future. Psychodynamic psychotherapy may involve quite brief therapy for specific difficulties.

Behavioural psychotherapy - tries to change patterns of behaviour more directly. Patients can be helped to overcome fears by spending more and more time in the situation they fear, or by learning ways of reducing their anxiety. Behavioural psychotherapy is particularly effective for anxiety, panic, phobias, obsessive-compulsive problems and various kinds of social or sexual difficulty. Relief from symptoms often occurs quite quickly.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - Like behavioural psychotherapy, it aims at changing thinking patterns directly, but like psychodynamic psychotherapy it encourages discussion of how we think and helps us to get rid of destructive ways of thinking. It does not focus very much on the past - more on the present and future and has achieved particular success in the treatment of certain types of depression.

Family and Marital Therapy - People's problems will often not be theirs alone, but are often the result of relationship problems in a marriage, partnership or family. By focusing very clearly on the relationships involved, and by involving all the people concerned, family and marital family therapy seek to help those relationships to work better. In marital therapy, a therapist or pair of therapist will meet with a married or committed couple so that they can work on their problems jointly. In family therapy, the whole family will be involved usually talking over their difficulties with a pair of therapists.