The methods, and when each one fits.

Two approaches with their own pages

EMDR and the Gottman Method are covered in full elsewhere rather than duplicated here — EMDR because it is one of the practice’s main offerings, and Gottman because it belongs with couples therapy rather than in a general list of methods.

How the choice is actually made

Being trained in several methods is only useful if the choice between them can be explained. Broadly: where something specific and current is maintaining a difficulty — avoidance, a thinking pattern, a habit — CBT tends to move fastest and has the largest evidence base. Where a memory is still firing in the present regardless of what you understand, EMDR is the more direct route. Where the nervous system holds a pattern that talking has not reached, somatic work addresses what insight does not.

Where you already understand the pattern completely and remain stuck, ACT targets the struggle rather than the symptom. Where the experience is of being genuinely divided against yourself, parts work fits that experience better than models that assume a single voice. Where emotion arrives faster than thought, DBT-informed skills are the most immediately practical — with an honest account of what full DBT involves and when you need it instead.

And where the goal is preventing a depressive episode from recurring rather than treating one, mindfulness-based programmes have specific evidence for exactly that — which is a narrower and stronger claim than the general enthusiasm around the word suggests.

Why every one of these pages says where it works poorly

A method page that lists only strengths is an advertisement. Each of these states the situations in which the approach is the wrong choice, because that is the information that actually helps you choose — and because a practitioner who cannot say when their method does not apply is someone to be careful of. The same principle governs the rest of the site; see how these pages are written.