Therapy
I work with of clients with a wide range of difficulties who feel ready to explore these challenges as a means to self-improvement. For many, these difficulties may appear as a feeling of being stuck. Whilst for others they may feel overwhelmed, lost, or experience a lack of purpose. I work with problems across the lifespan, addressing the way your difficulties are affecting you in the present and and helping you to identify the root causes from your past.
Short-Term Work
For many clients, short-term work is enough to help stabilise their condition and provide enough distance from their distress to make life easier and liveable again. This work tends to focus on current difficulties and uses approaches like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to bring about change that is explicitly in line with client’s values.
Long-Term Work
Sometimes this type of work can create an increased interest in our relationship patterns, our up-bringing and the stories we tell ourselves based on our history and our position in society. This is where medium and long-term therapy can be most helpful, allowing a detailed exploration of our lives and the history that has shaped it. This type of work often brings about significant change, helping to alter patterns we’ve become stuck in that bring us distress. This often leads to restored creativity and a rejuvenated interest in life and all it’s possibilities.
What therapeutic approaches do I work with?
Psychodynamic Therapy
Psychodynamic therapy focuses on the psychological roots of emotional suffering. Its distinctiveness lays in the exploration of unconscious processes manifesting in present behaviour, and the use of the relationship between therapist and client as a window into difficult relationship patterns in the client’s life. Psychodynamic therapy focuses on understanding the influence of the past on present behaviour. The approach supports clients to examine unresolved conflicts and symptoms originating from past dysfunctional relationships, which show up as habitual and maladaptive patterns.
Schema Therapy
Works directly with schemas, which are the lenses through which we grow to see ourselves, others and the world, frequently because of traumatic or emotionally distressing experiences during our childhood, when our emotional needs were not met. Schema therapy is an integrative therapeutic model, drawing upon psychodynamic therapy and CBT, attachment theory and experiential therapies. It seeks to improve our awareness of and to change the troublesome and repetitive patterns of behaviour, thoughts, emotions, and interpersonal styles that prove and strengthen schemas. Schema therapy is designed to address unmet needs and to help clients break these patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, which are often tenacious, and to develop healthier alternatives to replace them. Examples of schema beliefs for people who were neglected or emotionally deprived include a sense of being ‘defective’ or likely to be abandoned. For more complex early trauma, schema therapy offers a model call ‘modes’ or ‘self states’, which can temporarily emerge and dominate, and are made up of groups of schemas and coping strategies.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) ACT is based on the premise that psychological suffering is often caused not by difficult thoughts and feelings themselves, but by our attempts to avoid, suppress, or control them. These attempts can narrow our lives and disconnect us from what genuinely matters. ACT works to develop psychological flexibility: the capacity to be present with difficult internal experiences without being dominated by them, to step back from unhelpful thought patterns rather than treating them as facts, and to take meaningful action guided by your values. Rather than aiming to eliminate pain, ACT recognises that discomfort is an inevitable part of a full life. The aim is to build a life that feels rich, purposeful, and engaged, even in the presence of difficulty.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
CBT is a structured, goal-oriented approach based on the principle that our thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, and behaviours are closely interconnected, and that changing one can positively impact the others. Fundamental to the cognitive model is the recognition that our thinking operates at different levels. Core beliefs are deeply held convictions about ourselves, others, and the world, generally formed early in life and shaped by childhood experiences. These give rise to dysfunctional assumptions and negative automatic thoughts that can maintain difficulties such as depression, generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder, PTSD, and OCD. Therapist and client work collaboratively to identify and test these patterns, using a formulation that connects current difficulties to the historical experiences that shaped them. The ultimate aim is to equip clients with the tools to become thier own therapist.