Individual Therapy

Individual therapy provides a private space to explore your experiences, understand the emotional patterns shaping your life, and work toward meaningful change with the support of your therapist.

Sessions are tailored to your goals, circumstances, and the difficulties bringing you to therapy. Together, you may explore present-day challenges alongside earlier experiences that continue to influence how you feel, respond, and relate to yourself and others. Therapy can involve developing greater emotional awareness, understanding recurring patterns, processing painful experiences, and gradually changing ways of responding that may once have been protective but are now contributing to distress.

For members of the Evolve Therapy Membership, individual therapy can also work alongside group therapy and other aspects of treatment. This allows important themes emerging in one part of therapy to be explored more deeply in another, while maintaining a coherent understanding of what the member is working toward.

Our therapists work primarily from Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), an experiential approach that helps people understand and work directly with emotion rather than only discussing their difficulties intellectually. Therapy involves slowing down emotional experiences so that you and your therapist can understand what is happening beneath familiar reactions, including patterns of anxiety, anger, shame, self-criticism, emotional shutdown, or avoidance.

Depending on what you are struggling with, EFT may involve accessing emotions that have been difficult to tolerate or express, differentiating primary emotions from the reactions that develop around them, processing grief or painful experiences, working with shame and self-criticism, developing healthy anger and assertiveness, or understanding unmet emotional and relational needs. The aim is not simply to gain insight into why a pattern exists, but to create new emotional experiences that can begin to change the pattern itself.

Our psychologists and therapists may thoughtfully integrate other evidence-based approaches when they are clinically useful. Treatment remains collaborative and individualized, with the therapeutic approach shaped by the person, the problem being treated, and what is most likely to support meaningful change.

Individual therapy is appropriate for adults seeking support for trauma and PTSD, anxiety, depression, grief and loss, relationship difficulties, eating disorders and body image concerns, emotional dysregulation, shame and self-criticism, ADHD and neurodivergence, chronic illness and pain, substance use, burnout, and major life transitions.

Some people come to individual therapy because they are dealing with a specific period of distress. Others recognize longstanding emotional or relational patterns that continue to repeat despite considerable insight and effort. Individual therapy provides the opportunity to understand those difficulties in depth and work with the emotional processes that may be maintaining them.