PSYCHOTHERAPY

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.

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 CBT or Acceptance and Commitment therapy to bring about change that is explicitly in line with client’s values.

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)
An approach that helps us to develop acceptance of unwanted experiences that are out of our control, then become psychologically present and engaged before committing to take action in line with our values. In other words, the aim of ACT is to create a rich, full and meaningful life, while accepting the pain that inevitably goes along with it.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
An issue focused approach that helps us notice and change problematic thinking styles or behaviour patterns, and develop coping techniques to reduce anxiety and depression related disorders.

• Stress reactions

• Social Anxiety Disorders

• Low Self-Esteem 

• Perfectionism 

• Traumatic and Complicated Grief 

• Body Dysmorphia Disorder

• Sexual Addiction/Compulsitivity  

• Body Dysmorphic Disorder

• Impulse control disorders (Trichotillomania and skin picking)

• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome 

• Insomnia 

• Substance Misuse