What is psychotherapy?
Unlike counselling, which tends to be short-term and issue-focused, psychotherapy can be long-term and open-ended. This affords time for things to emerge at a realistic pace, without rush or overwhelm. If, after an initial session, you’d like to move ahead with weekly sessions, we’ll set a recurring day and time that is just for you and meet on this day, at this time, for 50 minutes each week.
I offer psychotherapy as a relationship that first and foremost offers safe harbour. Within this space, we have a particular kind of dialogue together that allows you to hear your experience. In my practice, I find that an integration of the existential-phenomenological and psychodynamic approaches best inform the unique dialogue that takes place.
My approach
The existential therapeutic approach is rooted in existential philosophy rather than psychology. As you might expect from its name, it deals with existential concerns; what it means to live finite lives, how we find ourselves born into a context we did not choose, and how we cope and struggle to find agency within this situation. Existential therapy understands human existence to be fraught with challenges and therefore doesn’t seek to pathologise or medicalise suffering.
Phenomenology in therapy is a way of engaging with our lived experience through describing it. This practice invites attuning to our past and present experience in new ways, to articulate it, to hear our own voice as we speak it aloud, and, to do this in the presence of a therapist who treats it with care.
Within the psychodynamic therapies, I draw particularly from attachment and relational therapy literature. These understand that our primary relationships and early years can be formative; we learn ways of relating to the world, and to others, that we repeat, often outside our awareness.
Integrating these approaches can shine a light on how and who we are in the context of our unique history. By gaining clarity, we can find ourselves feeling different.