Psychotherapy
What brings us to therapy is entirely unique for each of us and it is common for our reason for being in the process to evolve once we start to unpack things. Nonetheless, it might be helpful to know that individuals I mostly commonly work with often hope to explore experiences of:
Abuse, abortion, anger, anxiety, bereavement, bullying, childhood, chronic illness, crises of self, conflict, death & dying, depression, diabetes, diagnoses, existential crises, family, grief, loss, low self-esteem, identity, illness, meaninglessness, mortality, personality crises, reality, relationships, stress, stuckness, suicide, and trauma.
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
I am Accredited with the UKCP as an Existential Therapist and practise a therapeutic approach more specifically called existential-phenomenological psychotherapy. However, the first three years of my training were integrative, studying a range of psychological literature across the psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, and humanistic models. There is a great deal of natural overlap between the models, since all largely examine the nature of human experiencing, relating and suffering.
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 psychotherapy is a way of engaging with our lived experience through describing it. This practice invites us to notice what we are experiencing in the present moment, to remember what we have experienced and how this feels to us now, let our emotional expression emerge, develop language to articulate our experience, and hear and receive ourselves with openness.
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.