August 27, 2026
Have you ever felt confused by the sheer number of different approaches to counselling and psychotherapy? Struggled to know where to even start? Or maybe you’ve been in therapy for a while now, but you’re not seeing the results you hoped for – and you’d like to understand why.
That’s exactly what you’ll find here.
I won’t tell you which one’s “right.” I have a preference, if I’m honest, but I’m leaving it at the door for this one. Instead, we’ll look at what each approach actually does, how it works in practice, and where the real differences show up. Short, honest, and hopefully a little clearer by the end.
Three Lenses, One Landscape
Therapy is a complex field, and there are many ways to make sense of it. To bring clarity, I’ve grouped the different approaches into three categories: insight-orientated, action-orientated, and healing-orientated. It’s the lens I find most useful for understanding what’s actually out there.
Insight-Orientated Approach
Insight-orientated approaches (existential, humanistic, psychodynamic and psychoanalysis) share the assumption that psychological symptoms and maladaptive patterns arise from limited awareness of one’s own motivations and relational patterns.
Insight-orientated therapy has deep roots – it’s really where modern talk therapy began. Sigmund Freud pioneered psychoanalysis in the late 1800s, famously having patients lie on a couch while he sat out of view. The idea was to help patients look inward rather than at the analyst, encouraging thoughts and feelings to surface more freely. Decades later, in the 1940s, Carl Rogers took the field in a very different direction. Where psychoanalysis positioned the therapist as an expert interpreting the patient’s unconscious, Rogers introduced a more collaborative, humanistic approach — what became known as person-centred therapy, built on empathy and the belief that people already hold the capacity to grow when given the right conditions.
These two figures – Freud and Rogers – sit at the roots of most insight-orientated approaches practised today. And despite their differences, they were reaching for the same thing: understanding. Insight-orientated therapy, at its heart, is built on the belief that our struggles often come from not fully knowing ourselves – our motivations, our patterns, the quieter part of how we relate to others and the world.
It’s mostly done through talk. Sitting with a therapist, the person is gently encouraged to look back – at past experiences, old conflicts, the shape of their early years – not to dwell there, but to understand how these experiences still move through them today. The idea is simple, even if the process isn’t: once a pattern is seen clearly, it starts to lose some of its grip. Through conversation, through being heard, understanding becomes the doorway to change.
That’s really the whole aim of this approach — not to fix or direct, but to help someone see themselves more clearly. And for some people, that’s enough to shift something. But not always.
Understanding has its limits. Stories can lead to more stories, and insight on its own doesn’t always translate into change. Some people find they can talk about a pattern for years without it actually shifting – the sitting and talking become familiar, even comforting, in a way that can quietly stand in for movement. Insight is often a necessary first step. It’s just not always the whole journey.
Action-Orientated Approach
If insight-orientated therapy has Freud at its roots, action-orientated therapy has something closer to rebellion. Aaron Beck, the psychiatrist usually credited as its founder, actually trained as a psychoanalyst himself. In the 1960s, while testing Freudian theories about depression in his own clinical work, he kept running into the same problem: the data didn’t match the theory. Patients weren’t improving the way psychoanalysis predicted they should. So Beck did something fairly radical for the time – he set the old framework aside and started testing people’s thoughts directly against the evidence in front of them. Around the same time, another therapist, Joseph Wolpe, was having success treating phobias not through talk, but by gradually and safely exposing people to the very things they feared. Between them, cognitive therapy and behaviour therapy would eventually merge into what we now call CBT.
Where insight-orientated therapy asks “why”, action-orientated therapy asks, “what now”. It’s built on the belief that we’re wired for action – that people find purpose and relief not just in understanding themselves, but in doing something different. Rather than spending time in the past, the person is encouraged to work in the present: facing difficult thoughts and situations directly, practising new skills, and testing out new ways of responding. It tends to be brief, structured, and focused on a clear goal.
Its success isn’t measured in depth of self-understanding, but in something more concrete – a phobia that’s easing, a habit that’s shifting, a symptom that’s genuinely lifting.
But this raises a fair question: how do you know what to change if you don’t yet understand what happened to you, or what’s happening inside you? Action-orientated therapy tends to work with what’s right in front of it – the intrusive thought, the compulsion, the fear of public speaking – because that’s what gets results. And it does get results. But often, it’s the symptom of something deeper, not the thing itself. Treat the fear of public speaking, and another fear may take its place. The symptom shifts. The pattern underneath it doesn’t.
Healing-Orientated Approach
That raises another question: what would it take to reach it? Healing-orientated approaches – including Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and the InCorr Method – offer one answer: the body, not just the mind.
In the 1970s, Peter Levine, a biophysicist and psychologist, started asking a question the other two approaches hadn’t fully answered: why did some people seem unable to truly change, no matter how much they understood or how hard they tried? He noticed something curious in the animal world – wild animals face life-threatening danger constantly, yet rarely carry lasting trauma from it. Humans, by contrast, could talk about an experience for years and still feel stuck inside it. Levine’s answer was that trauma isn’t just held in memory or thought – it’s held in the body. This became Somatic Experiencing. Around the same time, Pat Ogden developed a related approach, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, using the body in much the same way – not as the goal, but as a way through to real, lasting change.
However, we don’t just experience what happens to us – we make meaning of it. Working within this same field of body-centred therapy, the InCorr Method builds on Levine and Ogden’s work and adds something their model couldn’t fully capture: the cognitive aspect of the experience. This approach holds that the meaning matters just as much as the sensation attached to it. And not just any meaning — the specific meaning made in their own words. Not something borrowed from a textbook, but something built by that one person, trying to make sense of what was happening to them.
It’s mostly done through the body. The mind can be shaped by conditioning, where we learn what is acceptable to feel or say. The body offers something talk alone can’t: precise, personal information, unique to the person. To truly change it, the experience in the body has to be felt, and the meaning allowed to rise to the surface. This isn’t just a nice idea – research on how emotional memory works shows that old patterns only really shift when they’re felt again, in a new way, not simply discussed.
At its heart, healing-orientated therapy is about transformation: insight deep enough to be felt, and change precise enough to last.
This approach asks for real commitment and consistency. The body only reveals what it’s holding when it feels safe enough to do so – and that tends to happen in layers, not all at once. Staying with the pacing, even when it feels slow, is part of the work itself. It can be genuinely frustrating, especially for anyone used to quick answers. (I’ll admit, this is the part I struggled with most myself.)
There’s also a risk worth naming honestly: because this work goes deeper, it can retraumatise someone if the practitioner hasn’t done their own work, or isn’t well trained in the methodology. That’s a risk insight-orientated and action-orientated approaches don’t carry in the same way – which makes the practitioner’s own preparation every bit as important as the method itself.
Where Does This Leave You?
Pulled back to its simplest form: insight-orientated therapy helps you understand your story. Action-orientated therapy helps you change your behaviour. Healing-orientated therapy helps you reach what’s underneath both.
What matters most is that you have enough understanding here to choose for yourself.
If body-centred psychotherapy has caught your curiosity, you can read more about how I work on my process page. But wherever you go from here, I hope it brings you closer to yourself.
