MY APPROACH

I practice as an integrative counsellor and psychotherapist . Integrative counselling and psychotherapy, as I am using the term, can be understood in three ways:

(i) a therapeutic approach which integrates and works with different therapeutic techniques and modes of understanding according to client need.

(ii) a holistic way of working that engages the client in their uniqueness and that attempts to address the various dimensions of a person’s life including their emotional, cognitive, behavioural and somatic ’systems’ and their social context.

(iii) a therapeutic approach which attempts to facilitate wholeness within people, relationships, families, communities, integrating the varying, often conflicted, parts into a greater unification or cohesiveness.

My work is influenced by the following therapeutic approaches: 

  • Relational/interpersonal psychotherapy.
  • EFT (Emotion Focused Individual/Couple Therapy).
  • Gestalt Therapy.
  • CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy).
  • Trauma studies.
  • Somatic psychotherapy approaches.
  • Mindfulness/Acceptance based practices and inquiry.
  • Transpersonal contexts.

I integrate the above ways of working according to client need. What follows is a short explication of some of these approaches:

My foremost and primary interest is in your uniqueness and in how I may be able to connect, empathize with you and attempt to understand how you organize and make meaning out of your life experiences. I attempt to create a safe, trusting and authentic space and relationship for us to meet and to begin to explore your world.

I am interested in your developmental history and patterns of relating to others. Often the work involves exploring the therapeutic relationship and what sort of contact/connection we have in our sessions: this allows an understanding of how you possibly contact/connect with others in your life.

I believe that accessing, naming and accepting our emotions and experiential states is one of the primary ways we can become free of stuck emotional patterns and create space for choice and change in our lives.  I like to work slowly and to allow space for you to access and become acquainted with your emotional life and to begin to experience and accept disowned parts of your experience.

The field of trauma studies has shown how strong/traumatic experiences can powerfully effect our various systems, (emotional, cognitive, physiological, attachment, relational and others), compromising our overall functioning.  I utilize some trauma models and techniques into my work.

Somatic and embodied psychotherapy approaches involve attuning ourselves to our somatic experience. In my work I help you to become aware of how you experience your body, including the connection between emotions and bodily-sensations, and trust that attunement to your own bodily process opens up spaces of feeling more grounded, connected to yourself and more able to relate to others.

Mindfulness is a practice that is becoming central to many western psychotherapeutic methods. The theory behind mindfulness is that it is our attachment to emotions/thoughts that create un-necessary suffering in our lives. The less attached we are to specific thoughts/emotions the freer we are to make healthy choices. I utilize mindfulness as a ‘climate’ to be cultivated within the therapeutic encounter which aids in the exploration of experience through a lessening of self-judgment and an increase of self- acceptance.

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