Services & Approaches
We honour our clients, the trauma, and challenging symptoms they experience. Developing connections, improving relationships. Evidence based therapy to help you and your family towards a brighter future.
Services for individuals, families, & organisations
Professional psychological assessments to plan the best way forward. Evidence-based therapy to help heal. Training and consultation to inform institutional practice.
However you need trauma-informed support, we’re here for you.
Services for individuals & families
Brighter Futures offers trauma-informed therapy for children looked after, families, and adults.
We will treat you with the compassion and empathy you deserve, whether you need support with your child’s behaviours of concern, or your own flashbacks. Whether you require help because your emotions feel out of control, or to better develop attachment with your child, we will support you.
Our practice is flexible and focused on you and your family’s needs, so if your child requires a psychological assessment with an additional specialism, such as a cognitive, or autism assessment, we can achieve that for you.
Services for organisations
Brighter Futures works with adoption agencies, charities, schools and residential homes, bringing the same careful, relationship-led approach to every person we support.
We provide psychological assessments, with a variety of add-ons, like cognitive and sexually harmful behaviour assessments, as well as diverse family and individual therapies for adoption agencies and charities.
Our Adoption and Special Guardianship Fund therapeutic packages include initial assessments and post-treatment assessments.
We offer trauma-informed consultations, staff training, psychological input, and regular reflective practice for organisations.
Our highly-qualified clinicians put ethical practice at the centre of all they do, so everyone: clients, practitioners, and the public, are kept safe.
Therapeutic approaches
At Brighter Futures there’s no need to worry about what kind of therapy is best for you. We discuss your experiences and your preferences in your free initial consultation. We’ll work through it together.
Integrative psychotherapy
No single therapy can treat every individual or family in every situation. People don’t fit neatly into books or single theories. Therapy should be tailored to individual needs and personal stories. Integrative Psychotherapy considers individual difficulties, goals, expectations and motivations.
Part of the process will be you and your therapist coming up with an assessment of your needs together. Developing a shared and thorough understanding of your difficulties and what led to them may be what you need most at this time. Perhaps you also need to develop strategies to reduce self-destructive behaviours, or nightmares.
At Brighter Futures, because our practitioners are trained in many therapeutic approaches, we can incorporate elements of many therapies within Integrative Psychotherapy. We may incorporate elements of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT); Trauma Focused-Cognitive Behavioural Therapy; Dialectic Behavioural Therapy (DBT); Psychodynamic Psychotherapy; Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP).
Because of its tailor-made approach, integrative psychotherapy is appropriate for many individuals and families, with many different kinds of difficulties. Integrative Psychotherapy is more than a simple combination, and each intervention equals more than the sum of its parts.
Dyadic developmental psychotherapy/DDP
We know how challenging it can be to raise adopted and fostered children, and children looked after under special guardianship orders. Adults can feel overwhelmed and under-prepared for the relentless, concerning, sometimes surprising behaviours they experience from children who can feel alien to them.
Children and young people feel out of control, unlovable, and inferior to others. They often don’t understand their own emotions and can’t say what they’re feeling. They communicate through behaviour. Their unbearable feelings are often expressed as behaviours which are unbearable for those around them.
DDP builds relationships between therapists and carers, creating a sense of support carers often haven’t experienced for a long time. Carers begin to feel listened to and believed, which replenishes them and builds their strength. Carers can then begin to understand their children, allowing them to feel listened to and understood, developing attachment between adults and children. DDP helps parents increase their children’s emotional literacy; helping them use words when they are hurting, rather than using behaviours which hurt themselves and others.
Non-violent resistance/NVR
NVR supports parents whose children’s behaviour is self-destructive, verbally or physically abusive, violent, or dangerous in other ways. Sometimes a child or young person's behaviour is so extreme, and so relentless, that adults can feel like they are constantly fighting fires, like there is never any progress. It can be overwhelming, exhausting, and frightening.
NVR is designed to help parents and carers reduce the behaviours they find most concerning in their children. NVR provides practical methods of working with young people in the moment.
NVR supports parents to resist these extremely challenging behaviours in non-harmful ways which deescalate situations and interrupt the cycle of conflict and aggression. NVR supports parents to strengthen their presence and demonstrate their authority through calm, clear boundaries. Restoring trust and connection is essential to bringing about change. NVR promotes supportive social networks, including extended family and friends, to reinforce young people’s feelings that they and their carers all belong to a community. NVR foregrounds reconciliation and teaches adults to maintain and repair the carer-child relationship.
NVR integrates well with trauma and attachment-informed approaches such as DDP.
Cognitive behavioural therapy/CBT
Trauma of many kinds can cause “re-experiencing” symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts and memories, as well as less obvious symptoms like depression and anxiety. Based on evidence that exposure to traumatic memories will reduce traumatic symptoms, we will help you become ready to face those memories in a highly structured exposure treatment involving talking and writing.
TF-CBT will also help you develop coping strategies for daily symptoms like anxiety and irritability. TF-CBT includes several other components, such as psychoeducation on how upsetting symptoms such as flashbacks develop in the brain, and self-esteem work. TF-CBT is an individual therapy and often takes around 16-20 sessions to complete. You must have been living in safety for at least six months before beginning.
Trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy/TF-CBT
CBT is used for a great many many issues (e.g., phobias, anxiety, depression). Several therapies for extreme difficulties have grown from it such as TF-CBT and DBT. CBT tends to be favoured by those who want to develop concrete strategies for today's difficulties, rather than discuss what might have caused them in the past.
It is built on the premise that our thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and physical sensations all influence each other. If we can change one, usually thoughts (cognition) or behaviour, the others will also change. CBT tends to appeal to people who like learning by doing because it uses evidence and worksheets, not just talking. It involves a lot of work between sessions, including logs and social experiments, so you need to be very self-motivated.
Dialectical behaviour therapy
DBT was originally a group therapy, but at Brighter Futures, we use DBT skills in individual and family settings only. DBT can be used to help treat extreme difficulties like self-harm, relationship difficulties, (family, friendship, and romantic), unbearable emotions, or emotional numbness. These difficulties can lead to impulsive behaviours as individuals try to cope with these overpowering sensations.
DBT addresses these difficulties through four modules, five for young people. The modules provide practical strategies for surviving crises without immediate recourse to unwanted, impulsive behaviours; relationship skills, including maintaining healthy boundaries and self-respect; taking greater control of our emotions; mindfulness; and avoiding extremes of thought, emotion, or opinion - the middle path.
Commonly asked questions
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If you have a genuine concern, such as a disability, which makes traveling difficult, and online therapy really isn’t for you or your family, we will try to find a room closer to you that is also a compromise.
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Types of therapy depend on a lot of things and they will all be discussed in your free one-hour consultation. You and our practitioner will come up with a plan together.
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Psychology is not the same as psychotherapy and therapy. Psychotherapy is the same as therapy.
Psychology is more about finding out what’s going on, including any useful diagnosis, so we can plan the way forward on a wider scale.
Psychotherapy/therapy is what we do in the room, on a weekly basis, making small steps together.
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There are two answers to this. First, you are absolutely welcome to request another of our therapists if you feel it’s not a good fit. Second, it’s completely normal to feel strong negative emotions, even frustration or dislike, toward your therapist — this is often a natural and important part of the therapeutic process. Working through these feelings, rather than walking away can actually be very beneficial to your recovery.
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We aim to create a space where you can talk to your therapist on a regular basis about how you are feeling about the therapeutic approach. Additionally, regular reviews give you the opportunity to make clear if it’s really not working for you and explore alternatives.
It’s also important to know that therapy isn’t always easy, and most approaches are likely to bring up some difficult images, thoughts, or emotions, whichever type of therapy you choose.
Get in touch
Get in touch and speak to a practitioner directly for a free one-hour initial consultation to understand your needs. Together we will create a preliminary plan, including a number of regular, carefully paced sessions and a review. Reviews will be followed by a thoughtful ending or fully planned next steps forward.
Or just get in touch to ask a question!