At North Ayrshire Psychology, we offer a range of evidence-based psychological therapy services to help you to improve your mental well-being. Therapy sessions are tailored to your own unique needs, based on your assessment and psychological formulation. This can evolve over time as your needs and goals change, or remain focussed on whatever issue is most important to you.

In practice, therapy will aim to help you to understand the links between your thoughts, emotions and actions, and to reflect on the things that we have identified as potential maintaining factors for your distress, and to think of ways to alleviate this. For example, if your distress is caused by loneliness because anxiety has led you to avoid your hobbies / interests / friendships, therapy can help you consider what meaningful steps could you take towards the things that matter to you / interaction with other people, to in turn alleviate the feelings of loneliness. Therapy may also aim to help you to develop your skills in self compassion, to treat yourself more kindly (as you might treat a close friend), and to understand the barriers you might face regarding this. It will likely also involve helping you to identify your own personal values (what really matters to you), and help you to plan how to live more closely in accordance with these values - for example if being fully present in your life is important to you but you are facing difficulties in this regard, what steps could you take to bring a greater sense of presence to your life (e.g. phone free evenings, mindfulness practice e.t.c.).

Therapy can also provide a safe space for you to speak about traumatic life events such as abuse / neglect, grief / loss, loss of role / role transition, a sense of loss regarding not having experienced certain life stages / events, relationship / friendship difficulties, experiences of discrimination or any other life events which have caused you distress. Therapy can also offer space to feel heard about current life stressors, such as carer stress, relationship difficulties, work stress or any other current source of distress in your life.

Therapies offered by North Ayrshire Psychology include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Compassion Focussed Therapy (CFT). In practice, we tend to utilise a mixture of these disciplines to best suit our individual clients' needs, or chose one main modality as informed by the formulation / discussion with clients re their favoured type of approach and own goals for therapy.

We offer 1-1 psychological therapy. We do not offer specific couples or family therapy, however if having somebody with you for some of your appointments would be helpful to you then this can usually be accommodated. We can also offer one off appointments to people within your support circle if this would have a therapeutic benefit to you.