People seek therapy for many different reasons. You may be very clear about your reason for wanting therapy or you may feel stuck and know you are struggling but are not quite sure why.
Everyone goes through periods of life when they feel off-balance, when everything feels extremely challenging and times when the every day feels overwhelming. I have worked with people encountering a spectrum of human suffering and existential dilemmas, from ordinary unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life to other struggling with severe mental illness.
Therapy offers an opportunity to investigate your inner world and beliefs, and to look at how meaning emerged in your relationship to the world. It is a unique situation where you can talk about the most personal, important and often most troubling parts of your life in a safe space with another person. It is a place to help you make sense of your experience, deepen the relationship you have with yourself and others.
Therapy is a creative and collaborative experience where you get to know yourself better. We work together to find new understanding, increase self-awareness and consider different perspectives.
Therapy enables us to move on from the past by learning from it and understanding where we place ourselves in relationship to it. As we become more aware of the patterns we repeat, and how we get in the way of ourselves, we enable more informed choices in the present.
Therapy might be short term, 6-12 weeks, which often would focus on a specific issue. Open-ended therapy would be a deeper exploration of underlying issues and patterns that have been developed and the implications they have. This would be dependant on your needs and discussed in the initial consultation.
“If the outer world is to be transformed, the process must begin within. If the inner world is to be transformed, it must be understood in light of the outer forces that shaped it.”
existential anaylsis
A process in which all aspects of being can be explored without judgement. A self enquiry that can lead to a deeper understanding of how you are in the world and how you relate to others. It is likely that the process would include reflection on relationships, the roles we play and the stories we tell ourselves about our selves and our lives. It is an opportunity to consider what is serving us and what is getting in the way.
One way of seeing this process is a phenomenological enquiry in to our experience that attends to each individual, treating the person rather than the problem.
We work together to explore the underlying issues that might be contributing to the present symptoms. The exploration takes into account social, sexual, political and psychological aspects of an individual’s way of being and way they experience themselves in the world.