Michael John Theron

Practical, skills-based approaches can help clients better understand patterns in their thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and relationships, while developing tools to respond differently. These approaches are often structured and active, but not rigid. At MJT, they are adapted to the client’s circumstances, goals, readiness, and wider life context.

• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT, explores the relationship between thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and life situations. It can help clients identify unhelpful patterns, test new perspectives, and practise more constructive ways of responding to challenges.

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, helps clients relate differently to difficult thoughts and emotions, rather than becoming stuck in a struggle against them. It emphasises values, psychological flexibility, and meaningful action, even in the presence of discomfort.

• Dialectical Behavioural Therapy

DBT-based skills draw from Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, particularly in areas such as emotional regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness, and interpersonal effectiveness. These skills may be helpful when clients feel overwhelmed, reactive, emotionally stuck, or unsure how to navigate difficult situations without escalating distress.

These approaches place emphasis on the person behind the difficulty. They focus on self-understanding, autonomy, strengths, values, personal meaning, and the possibility of constructive change. At MJT, they help ensure therapy remains human, collaborative, and grounded in the client’s lived experience rather than reducing the person to symptoms alone.

• Client-Centred Therapy

Client-centred therapy is built around empathy, respect, and a non-judgemental therapeutic relationship. It creates space for clients to explore their experiences honestly, develop greater self-understanding, and reconnect with their own capacity for growth, choice, and direction.

• Solution-Focused Therapy

Solution-focused therapy is a practical, goal-oriented approach that helps clients clarify what they want to move toward, not only what they want to move away from. It focuses on strengths, resources, previous progress, and small, workable steps that can support meaningful change.

• Positive Psychology

A positive psychology framework explores strengths, resilience, meaning, purpose, values, and well-being. It does not ignore distress or difficulty, but helps clients build towards a life that feels more stable, constructive, and personally meaningful.

These approaches help clients explore how earlier experiences, relationships, developmental history, and recurring emotional patterns may shape present difficulties. The focus is not only on symptom relief but also on deeper self-understanding, emotional insight, and the recognition of patterns that may influence choices, relationships, identity, and wellbeing.

• Psychodynamic Therapy

Psychodynamic therapy explores how past experiences, unconscious patterns, emotional conflicts, and important relationships may continue to influence present thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. It can help clients understand recurring patterns more clearly and create space for meaningful personal change.

• Interpersonal & Relational Approaches

Interpersonal and relational approaches focus on how relationships shape emotional wellbeing. This may include exploring attachment patterns, communication, trust, boundaries, conflict, loss, intimacy, and the ways clients experience themselves in relation to others.

• Developmental Psychology

A developmental psychology lens considers how different stages of life, early experiences, family context, identity formation, and major transitions can shape psychological wellbeing. This lens can be especially useful when working with adolescents, young adults, parents, caregivers, or clients navigating significant life changes.

Family and systems-informed approaches consider the wider context around a person’s difficulties, including relationships, family dynamics, roles, communication patterns, boundaries, and the environments in which problems develop or persist. At MJT, this may include direct family-based work where appropriate, as well as systems-informed individual therapy that helps clients understand how their broader context shapes their experience.

• Family Systems Therapy

Family systems therapy understands difficulties within the context of family relationships and interaction patterns. Rather than viewing one person as “the problem,” it examines how roles, communication, expectations, conflict, loyalty, boundaries, and patterns within the family system may contribute to distress or create opportunities for change.

• Strategic Family Therapy

Strategic family therapy is a focused and practical approach to family-based work. It pays attention to the patterns that may be maintaining a problem and helps identify specific shifts in communication, behaviour, roles, or boundaries that may support healthier family functioning.

• Systems-Informed Individual Work

Systems-informed individual work helps clients understand how relationships, family background, work environment, culture, responsibilities, and wider life context may influence mental health. This approach can be useful when personal difficulties cannot be fully understood in isolation from the systems around the person.