Therapies
Martine has extensive training and experience in treating adults with a wide range of mental health difficulties.
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These include depression, anxiety, managing chronic illness, perinatal mental health, eating disorders, grief and adjustment issues.
She holds a PhD and Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the University of Sydney. Martine works primarily within a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and/or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy framework to help her clients learn to manage the issues that have brought them to therapy.
COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL THERAPY
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is based on the idea that the way we think can affect the way we feel and behave in the world. It suggests that psychological problems can emerge from the way in which we evaluate certain events in our lives, and can impact our thoughts and feelings, as well as behaviours. That means that by changing the way we think about things (events/situations in our lives), we are able to change unhelpful habits or behaviours, and learn to think in more realistic and helpful ways.
The goal of CBT is therefore to help people to indentify their unhelpful thinking patterns or behaviours, so that they are able to learn more positive ways of coping with distress in their lives, and to reduce avoidance and/or other unhelpful behaviours, such as addictions, that might have a role to play in contributing to distress, or keeping it going.
ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a treatment approach which takes the position that personal suffering stems from our attempts to avoid the experience of emotional pain, rather than from the experience of that emotional pain itself. The things we want to avoid might include thoughts, feelings, sensations and memories that cause us distress. And usually, we manage to avoid these experiences in the short term. But in the long term our attempts at avoidance are often unhelpful or ineffective. For example, alcohol use is a common avoidance strategy, which helps us feel better in the short term, but usually has a very destructive impact on our lives over the long term.
ACT therefore uses exercises, such as mindfulness, to help clients become more in touch with being in the present. The goal of ACT is to help people develop emotional flexibility, and a willingness to experience their distress rather than avoid it, while staying focussed on finding meaning-filled and valued ways of living their lives.
