My approach

Psychotherapy is different from speaking to a family member or friend as a psychotherapist is professionally trained to listen and not to try and ‘fix’ things for you. This approach fosters an environment where, together with your therapist, you can think together about your life experiences and consider how they have impacted upon you. The experiences that you have in the present day often link to the past, but this may not only relate to your immediate family, but also to how experiences at school, friendships, partners, work and society at large have influenced your inner world.

As your therapist will actively listen to what you tell me, without judgement and I will also think carefully about what you are saying, and offer my own associations and perspectives from time to time. Indeed, perhaps the most curative aspect and the very foundation of therapy is when you actually experience a felt sense that you have been heard and seen as you wish to be, not as someone else wants you to.

working with relational patterns and the unconscious

With experience, I have come to see at first hand the value in identifying unconscious processes and how they can lead to emotional suffering. This kind of awareness is a very important part of effecting change in psychotherapy and moving beyond ‘stuck’ painful relational patterns where the past hauntingly recurs in the present.

This approach means that you can take responsibility for your own thoughts and feelings, and see that although new perspectives can sometimes be unsettling, they can also be very liberating. You may find that therapy facilitates a ‘space between’ yourself and your experiences and opens up further perspectives or viewpoints to you. This is rather like when you have not seen a painting or film for a while, and when you return to it, you notice something different; you now see with new eyes, which enriches your emotional response.

What happens in a therapy session?

Some sessions will be as you may imagine in a ‘traditional’ therapy session where it is two people talking to one another, ‘working through’ what emerges and thinking about what this means in the context of your relationship to yourself, other people, and your surrounding environment. However, this process is not only about talking about what has bothered recently, but is also a means of giving space to the aspects of yourself you may reject or find it hard to think about, which are now making themselves known again through troubling or distressing experiences. Psychotherapy is therefore an effective means of naming and making sense of the experiences which trouble, baffle, or simply overwhelm you.

the imagination

Using your imagination can be really helpful in psychotherapy. The imagination, as Coleridge said, is not just something superfluous that we ‘fantasise’ with, it is itself an important thinking function. The imagination therefore offers unforseen perspectives; it has its own particular, - and sometimes peculiar - kind of wisdom. Routes to the imaginal in psychotherapy may be found through a dream you have had, or by talking about a piece of music, painting, or book which you relate to. We will then spend time thinking together about whatever has emerged from this, and reflect upon how it might be important to you personally. This is an important process as the arts, mythology and folklore that we feel drawn to, also relate to our emotional lives at the deepest level. This way of working can also be complementary to art therapy (see below.)

what are the benefits of Therapy?

Using your imaginative resources can create a new narrative for your emotional life that may have felt fragmented and lost for many years. You can then discover and develop a relationship to parts of yourself that due to painful experiences you never knew existed. Emotions are no longer to be feared or overwhelmed by; they now become things only to be experienced and important indicators of what you feel. It then becomes easier to recognise them and what they mean as you go on with your life.

This new way of relating to your emotional self can improve your relationship between your instincts and cognitive mind (reasoning/ reflective capacity), increase your sense of self and resilience to problems, enrich your experience of living a fuller life and become an important source of creativity. Psychotherapy takes time and is an investment, but its effects can be profound and long lasting.

ART THERAPY

I am a trained art therapist/psychotherapist but it is not a pre-requisite that you use art materials in therapy. You may feel what works best for you is the more ‘traditional’ route of psychotherapy. If you wish however, you might like to work with expressive arts such as drawing/ painting. Drawing/ artistic skills are not needed at all. These non-verbal methods of expression are sometimes very helpful in terms of accessing the unconscious mind and the deeper layers of the self that otherwise cannot be articulated through words. It can also help you to make sense of whatever emotions you are experiencing. Read more about art therapy.

EMDR

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) can be a helpful way of processing traumatic memories that have become ‘stuck’. EMDR is quite different from more traditional psychotherapy approaches as it aims to target a particular traumatic memory, along with the emotions and body sensations which are associated with it. As research has shown that the residue of trauma is stored in the body, EMDR protocols therefore reflect this. I have found that EMDR to be particularly effective when integrated with psychotherapy and/ or art therapy. Please note I do not offer standalone EMDR treatment such as in the case of single event traumas such as those caused by accidents.