Psychotherapy
Peace of mind to help us meet the challenges of today's stressful life is very important. Stress is the cause of most chronic and life-shortening diseases and the root cause of stress typically lies in the relationship that we have with our mind. This becomes particularly clear when we understand how we can free ourselves from the controlling nature of our mind. Psychotherapy can help to change how we relate to our thinking, not be driven by our mind and to choose how we are going to relate to ourselves and life. Many of us also suffer with deeper issues that may have their origins from early in our life history and my training is also as a psychodynamic psychotherapist and these approaches are also central to my work. We may have suffered trauma that has become trapped in our body and taken on life strategies and conditioned behaviours that now manifest in such troubling issues. Anxiety, depression, addictive behaviours, stress related disorders and relationship issues are some of the outcomes that can often get triggered many years after the initial trauma.
I work with a whole-person approach to therapy, which addresses integration across these three key aspects of our self: mind, body and spirit - to find a way home to our true nature and the individual that we are meant to be.
Central to this approach is developing a mindful, embodied way of being to help keep mind and body in balance and to provide the optimum and ongoing self-regulation that we need to match the challenges of our busy 24/7 existence. My training and experience are founded in both mindfulness and psychodynamic (ie relating to depth work, the unconscious mind and the whole person) approaches to therapy. I specialise in helping people with trauma and PTSD and my training and experience in this area puts me in a strong position to help those who suffer in this ways.
Central to my ethos as a psychotherapist is the belief that within us, we each carry our own inner wisdom or unconscious intelligence. I also believe that we are inherently creative and given the right circumstances, everyone can heal, grow, and change for the better at all stages of life, with a helping hand.
Psychotherapy is a collaborative inquiry into your life - a journey of self exploration that you embark upon with your therapist. Its aim is to help you to manage your life issues, connect you with real feelings, help you to deal with your wounding, and thus free you up for the possibility of lifelong change. You don’t have to be ‘ill’ to see a psychotherapist. People see a psychotherapist for a variety of reasons, ranging from life/career guidance to severe mental health difficulties, because they value the trust, support and empowerment that they gain.
In therapy a person can become aware of their feelings, behaviours, and thoughts influenced by core material involving distinct themes, such as safety and belonging, support, love and appreciation, freedom and responsibility, openness and honesty, control, power, sexuality and membership. Sometimes people begin to realise that some of these automatic ways of experiencing life are causing them suffering. Psychotherapy uncovers these habitual patterns which tell us what we do, and how we do it and it supports people to move towards a natural unfolding of seeing things in a new way. When we make our beliefs conscious like this, we can awaken ourselves to improved choices and ways of relating.
Psychotherapy can, typically, be healing. Everyone is an expert on themselves and healing is an act of self-recreation - so the therapist is a guide for the process and is not a healer. We essentially change when we can connect with the wisdom and healing power inherent in each of us. The role of the therapist is not to set any agenda or assume that they know best for the client, but to support the client in exploring their experience, new experiences, in particular that teach the client what is possible for them.
Revealing your thoughts and feelings to a stranger is not always easy but the trained psychotherapist provides a confidential, non judgemental and empathic environment where trust can be built and exploration can commence.
How Does Therapy Work?
Through therapy you can develop greater self understanding and self awareness; an understanding of the cause of your difficulties and an awareness of why you are feeling the way you are feeling. Looking at past experiences and emotional patterns can be useful as early experiences can determine how you behave and feel as adults. Early relationships with parents or carers often define the relationships we have in later life, both with others as well as with ourselves. Through therapy, we become more conscious of our patterns of behaviour and emotional functioning. This sense of self awareness leads to a greater sense of wellbeing, freedom and personal authority.
During psychotherapy, defences will be confronted and underlying anxieties uncovered that can reveal true and intensely experienced feelings. Making connections between these defences, anxieties and true feelings can develop new 'self-awareness', and a capacity to understand difference in others and in the world in which you live, so that you can begin to bear what might have felt unbearable.
How Can Psychotherapy Help?
Benefits of Psychotherapy:
Use Psychotherapy to build and restore your brain and your potential for a rewarding relationship and work life
Through the experience of a healthy psychotherapeutic relationship you can increase your ability to calmly regulate your emotions, since the social and regulatory circuits of the brain are similar.
Strengthen your self esteem
As you become aware of your issues, and what seemed to be your personality limitations you can begin to recognise what your strengths are. In turn you begin to relate to yourself positively as you feel greater compassion towards yourself and others. This enables you to connect more deeply with people.
Resolve relationship struggles and develop your intuition
Through self-inquiry you expand your perspectives of your core beliefs which were formed in early childhood. You learn that they are habitual patterns. Some of these behaviours are no longer necessary and you can choose more satisfactory ways of relating. Having a balanced mind-body allows you to react less, and less automatically to familiar situations. As you become aware of and listen to yourself you can learn to trust yourself and develop your intuition.
Increase your capacity for emotional resilience
A psychotherapist can support you to feel stable and strong inside by replacing negative material with positive material and help you to accept and internalise positive feelings that nourish you.
Feel more at peace with the uncertainties of life
Difficult emotional responses can be changed when you learn to step back from, observe, and be present with them. These emotions can change over time when we feel them. When there is full presence with what’s happening in the mind-body, real healing can happen, and you can feel less scared about life’s challenges.
Sense more freedom with better boundaries
With psychological education and sensorimotor processing you can strengthen your boundaries, and build your resources to sufficiently respond to difficult memories, and complete effective defensive responses.
Feel present, comfortable and happy
Transform traumatic memories felt in the mind-body so that feeling alive is pleasurable. As you separate traumatic memories from the past that taint your current experience, your life begins to feel like an adventure to be explored and enjoyed
Psychotherapy & Counselling - the Differences:
I work with a whole-person approach to therapy, which addresses integration across these three key aspects of our self: mind, body and spirit - to find a way home to our true nature and the individual that we are meant to be.
Central to this approach is developing a mindful, embodied way of being to help keep mind and body in balance and to provide the optimum and ongoing self-regulation that we need to match the challenges of our busy 24/7 existence. My training and experience are founded in both mindfulness and psychodynamic (ie relating to depth work, the unconscious mind and the whole person) approaches to therapy. I specialise in helping people with trauma and PTSD and my training and experience in this area puts me in a strong position to help those who suffer in this ways.
Central to my ethos as a psychotherapist is the belief that within us, we each carry our own inner wisdom or unconscious intelligence. I also believe that we are inherently creative and given the right circumstances, everyone can heal, grow, and change for the better at all stages of life, with a helping hand.
Psychotherapy is a collaborative inquiry into your life - a journey of self exploration that you embark upon with your therapist. Its aim is to help you to manage your life issues, connect you with real feelings, help you to deal with your wounding, and thus free you up for the possibility of lifelong change. You don’t have to be ‘ill’ to see a psychotherapist. People see a psychotherapist for a variety of reasons, ranging from life/career guidance to severe mental health difficulties, because they value the trust, support and empowerment that they gain.
In therapy a person can become aware of their feelings, behaviours, and thoughts influenced by core material involving distinct themes, such as safety and belonging, support, love and appreciation, freedom and responsibility, openness and honesty, control, power, sexuality and membership. Sometimes people begin to realise that some of these automatic ways of experiencing life are causing them suffering. Psychotherapy uncovers these habitual patterns which tell us what we do, and how we do it and it supports people to move towards a natural unfolding of seeing things in a new way. When we make our beliefs conscious like this, we can awaken ourselves to improved choices and ways of relating.
Psychotherapy can, typically, be healing. Everyone is an expert on themselves and healing is an act of self-recreation - so the therapist is a guide for the process and is not a healer. We essentially change when we can connect with the wisdom and healing power inherent in each of us. The role of the therapist is not to set any agenda or assume that they know best for the client, but to support the client in exploring their experience, new experiences, in particular that teach the client what is possible for them.
Revealing your thoughts and feelings to a stranger is not always easy but the trained psychotherapist provides a confidential, non judgemental and empathic environment where trust can be built and exploration can commence.
How Does Therapy Work?
Through therapy you can develop greater self understanding and self awareness; an understanding of the cause of your difficulties and an awareness of why you are feeling the way you are feeling. Looking at past experiences and emotional patterns can be useful as early experiences can determine how you behave and feel as adults. Early relationships with parents or carers often define the relationships we have in later life, both with others as well as with ourselves. Through therapy, we become more conscious of our patterns of behaviour and emotional functioning. This sense of self awareness leads to a greater sense of wellbeing, freedom and personal authority.
During psychotherapy, defences will be confronted and underlying anxieties uncovered that can reveal true and intensely experienced feelings. Making connections between these defences, anxieties and true feelings can develop new 'self-awareness', and a capacity to understand difference in others and in the world in which you live, so that you can begin to bear what might have felt unbearable.
How Can Psychotherapy Help?
- Living with peace of mind to help us meet the challenges of our stressful existence is very important. Stress is the cause of most chronic and life-shortening diseases and the root cause of stress typically lies in the relationship that we have with our mind. Psychotherapy can help to change how we relate to our thinking, to be in control and not be driven by our mind. Psychotherapy can help you gain understanding as a means to manage overwhelming thoughts, feelings or unwanted behaviours and so help in decreasing your stress levels. By sharing thoughts, fears and anxieties with an experienced, professional psychotherapist you can gain relief, clarity, reduced stress and be able to find a healthier way forward.
- Psychotherapy can help you build healthier relationships. Through the examination of relationship problems, you can gain a better understanding of how your relationships work. In examining repeated patterns in relationships, expectations of others and of yourself for example, psychotherapy will help you discover how the difficulties arise and help you move forward into healthier patterns of relating.
- It can help build your self esteem and confidence. By sharing your difficult feelings with a psychotherapist you will be listened to and understood. From this understanding, your psychotherapist will help you build your self value, encouraging you to see yourself and value yourself in different, and more healthy, ways.
- Psychotherapy can also help you eliminate self destructive patterns of behaviour and patterns of thinking. By examining the root cause of the destructive patterns, with your psychotherapist you will gain an understanding of why you are behaving destructively and, together with your therapist, find a healthier way forward.
- Alone it is easy to stay stuck, but working together it becomes easier to let go of deeply held issues. Psychotherapy can be pivotal in helping us to come back into balance and to change how we relate to our thinking, so that we are no longer so driven by our mind. Hidden parts of you may emerge, leading to a more complete and authentic approach to life.
- Psychotherapy helps to expand our awareness and understanding so as to bring greater consciousness into our everyday lives, in order to create choice for new, more useful and fulfilling ways of being in the world, rather than be at the affect of habitual patterns of reacting.
- A key reasons for losing our way is how we separate into the parts we own and take responsibility for and those we don’t. Psychotherapy facilitates healing by helping us to get back to integration and wholeness, where we can be at one with our self. This is transformational work that is both challenging and rewarding, and can provide you with strength to meet life’s struggles, rather than turn away.
Benefits of Psychotherapy:
Use Psychotherapy to build and restore your brain and your potential for a rewarding relationship and work life
Through the experience of a healthy psychotherapeutic relationship you can increase your ability to calmly regulate your emotions, since the social and regulatory circuits of the brain are similar.
Strengthen your self esteem
As you become aware of your issues, and what seemed to be your personality limitations you can begin to recognise what your strengths are. In turn you begin to relate to yourself positively as you feel greater compassion towards yourself and others. This enables you to connect more deeply with people.
Resolve relationship struggles and develop your intuition
Through self-inquiry you expand your perspectives of your core beliefs which were formed in early childhood. You learn that they are habitual patterns. Some of these behaviours are no longer necessary and you can choose more satisfactory ways of relating. Having a balanced mind-body allows you to react less, and less automatically to familiar situations. As you become aware of and listen to yourself you can learn to trust yourself and develop your intuition.
Increase your capacity for emotional resilience
A psychotherapist can support you to feel stable and strong inside by replacing negative material with positive material and help you to accept and internalise positive feelings that nourish you.
Feel more at peace with the uncertainties of life
Difficult emotional responses can be changed when you learn to step back from, observe, and be present with them. These emotions can change over time when we feel them. When there is full presence with what’s happening in the mind-body, real healing can happen, and you can feel less scared about life’s challenges.
Sense more freedom with better boundaries
With psychological education and sensorimotor processing you can strengthen your boundaries, and build your resources to sufficiently respond to difficult memories, and complete effective defensive responses.
Feel present, comfortable and happy
Transform traumatic memories felt in the mind-body so that feeling alive is pleasurable. As you separate traumatic memories from the past that taint your current experience, your life begins to feel like an adventure to be explored and enjoyed
Psychotherapy & Counselling - the Differences:
- 'Psychotherapy' and 'Counselling' are terms that are often used interchangeably. Some practitioners may choose to use both terms when referring to themselves. Although they are similar (both practices share the goal of relieving psychological symptoms and enabling individuals to live more fullfilled lives), there are some key differences.
- 'Counselling' is generally used to denote a briefer process than psychotherapy and is mostly focused upon behaviour patterns and often targets a particular symptom or problematic situation.
- 'Psychotherapy' is generally a longer term treatment which focuses more on gaining insight into the underlying causes of emotional problems. Its focus is on the patient's thought processes and ways of being in the world rather than specific problems.
- Generally speaking, psychotherapy requires more skill from the practitioner that counselling. Psychotherapy training requires a longer, more rigorous academic and clinical focus than counselling training. Whilst a psychotherapist is qualified to provide counselling, a counsellor may not possess the necessary training and skills to provide psychotherapy.
- In practice there may be quite a bit of overlap between psychotherapy and counselling.
