Why Psychotherapy or Counselling?
There are a number of reasons why someone might want to talk to a therapist or counsellor. Perhaps you’ve recently experienced something that has affected your mental health — a bereavement, trauma, or change in circumstances, such as the end of a relationship. Maybe you’ve been struggling with unproductive or challenging patterns of thinking, behaving and relating for years and are looking to finally make a change .
Whatever the case may be, seeking out a therapist to talk to can help you change your relationship to yourself, others and improve your mental health overall. The difficulties we face may sometimes seem arbitrary, but they often have an unconscious meaning specific to our history and current experience. Talk therapy treatment proceeds by encouraging you to look at your experience in detail and discover these unconscious connections. Over time, this exploration, of both conscious and unconscious conflicts, can loosen the grip these unhelpful patterns hold over you, leading to a less constrained, more fulfilling experience of life.
My Approach
I work within the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic tradition of counselling and psychotherapy. This form of talk therapy began with Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century and has since expanded in many directions. The core idea underpinning talking therapy is that we are not always aware of what drives us; many of our deepest, most profound desires are unconscious and often at odds with who we consciously take ourselves to be. Often, this kind of material is only accessible through our dreams, fantasies and the occasional slips and inconsistencies in the language we use.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy encourages you to uncover these inner conflicts and challenge them through a detailed exploration of your experience. This can lead to an improvement in your mental health and a reduction in symptoms, but the process can be challenging at times. It is a very different approach to short term solutions like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) or EMDR. By tackling your mental health problems at their root, you stand a better chance of longer lasting change. Cognitive behavioural therapy and EMDR, by contrast, whilst sometimes effective in the short term, often fail to address underlying processes, and are less effective over time as a result.
Mental Health Issues Psychotherapy or Counselling can Treat
Depression | anxiety | loss and bereavement | sense of hopelessness or worthlessness | loss of direction in life | relationship and family problems or breakdown | panic attacks | self-harm | Trauma | sexual abuse | sexual assault | disordered eating | phobias | retired or thinking about retirement | post-natal depression | lack of confidence | the ageing process | making poor decisions or unable to decide | obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) | difficulties with alcohol or drugs | issues around parenting | borderline personality disorder (BPD) | bi-polar disorder and more…
