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 aspects of your experience to emerge at a realistic pace and for long lasting change to unfold. 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.
Psychotherapy is a relationship that first and foremost offers safe harbour. Within this space, we have a particular type 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.
The phenomenological approach in therapy is concerned with bringing your experience to light. A space is gently held for parts of your inner world to come forward without judgement or scrutiny.
Within the psychodynamic therapies, I draw particularly from attachment and relational therapy literature. These understand that our primary relationships and early years are 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 we are being and reveal who we are in the context of our unique history. By gaining clarity, we can find ourselves feeling different.