Non-Pharmacological Interventions
CBT, EMDR, IFS, SE, and the disputed
25 interventions. 6 rest on strong human evidence. Ordered with the best evidenced first.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the Gold Standard and the Yardstick
The most studied and most cross-culturally validated psychotherapy there is, strong enough to be the yardstick other therapies are measured against, with an honest caveat about shrinking real-world effects.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
A behavior therapy that asks you to stop wrestling painful thoughts and instead carry them toward what you value, with some of the steadiest evidence in the third-wave family.
Cognitive Processing Therapy
A structured 12-session protocol that proponents describe as treating post-traumatic distress by helping survivors challenge the rigid "stuck points" trauma installs about safety, trust, power, and self-blame.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
A behavioral therapist who trained in a Zen monastery built the first treatment reported across multiple trials to cut suicide attempts in people most clinicians had given up on.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
A WHO-endorsed PTSD treatment that clearly works, attached to a mechanism (the eye movements) that may not be the active ingredient.
Prolonged Exposure Therapy
A structured trauma-focused therapy that asks survivors to deliberately revisit, in detail and out loud, the memory they most want to avoid, on the premise that approach rather than escape is what loosens fear's grip.
Breathwork (Voluntary Breath Regulation)
An umbrella for dozens of breath techniques whose oldest forms reach back to Vedic India, where slow controlled breathing earns the strongest evidence for stress and anxiety while the more dramatic hyperventilation methods remain long on theory and short on trials.
Emotion-Focused Therapy
A short-term experiential talk therapy that treats raw emotion, not just thought, as the lever its developers say moves lasting change in depressed individuals and distressed couples.
A collaborative, deliberately non-confrontational conversation style that proponents say helps a person talk themselves into change rather than being argued into it.
Psychodynamic Therapy (Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy)
A talk therapy that treats present symptoms as echoes of unconscious conflict and early relationships, long dismissed as untestable and now backed by a respectable, if contested, body of trial evidence.
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)
The first cognitive-behavioral therapy, built by repackaging a 2,000-year-old Stoic idea: you are disturbed not by events, but by the rigid beliefs you hold about them.
Schema Therapy (Schema-Focused Therapy)
A long-form talk therapy that hunts down the self-defeating "schemas" laid in childhood, with its best evidence concentrated in borderline personality disorder and thinner support everywhere else.
A talk therapy that sets aside why you are stuck and instead asks, in plain language, what your life would look like once you are not.
Brainspotting (BSP)
A trauma therapy built on a single arresting idea, that where you fix your eyes changes what you feel, riding ahead of the science meant to test it.
Gestalt Therapy (Perlsian Gestalt psychotherapy)
A present-moment talking therapy that stages your inner conflicts as live dialogue, most famously by having you speak to an empty chair.
Internal Family Systems Therapy
A talk therapy that treats the mind as a household of distinct inner parts gathered around a calm core Self, popular and clinically promising yet resting on a contested claim about what those parts actually are.
Jungian Analysis (Analytical Psychology)
A depth psychotherapy that treats dreams, symbols, and the slow project of becoming whole as the real clinical material, built by a Swiss psychiatrist who openly borrowed his core ideas from Chinese, Indian, and alchemical sources.
A counseling approach that treats the person and the problem as separate things, so the work becomes re-authoring the story someone tells about their own life.
Psychodrama and Sociometry
A group therapy that asks people to stage their inner lives on their feet, with one person stepping into the scene while others play the roles, so that what is usually only talked about gets enacted, witnessed, and worked through.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP)
A talk-and-body trauma therapy that treats posture, gesture, and nervous-system arousal as the material of healing, built on Buddhist mindfulness it inherited through Hakomi.
Somatic Experiencing
A body-first trauma therapy whose proponents treat distress as survival energy stuck mid-discharge, asking the nervous system to finish a movement it never completed.
Compassionate Inquiry (CI)
A trauma-focused talk-therapy method built by physician Gabor Maté that traces present-day symptoms back to suppressed childhood emotion held in the body, taught worldwide through a paid certification yet barely studied on its own.
Dynamic Neural Retraining System (limbic system retraining)
A self-directed, daily-rehearsed "limbic retraining" program that asks people with chronic, hard-to-treat illness to rewire what it frames as a stuck threat response, with the company's strong recovery claims still well ahead of any independent controlled evidence.
Hakomi Method (Hakomi Experiential Psychotherapy; Body-Centered Psychotherapy)
A talk-therapy method that asks clients to slow down, drop into present-moment mindfulness, and let the body's habits surface what words alone defend against.
A Clinical Framework With Broad Uptake and a Contested Neuroscience
The most influential, and most contested, theory in modern trauma care: its clinical language is everywhere while its core neuroanatomy is under sustained scientific challenge.