My Approach to Helping
Psychotherapy', 'Counselling', and 'Counselling Psychology', are terms referring to the professional practice of exploring human experience with the intention of helping another person to understand themselves and to change. But no one is an expert on life. When searching for a counsellor, psychologist, or therapist, a potential client might consider navigating with their intuition in order to find a human being that they feel able to relate to, someone who is open to self-examination as well as interested in the worlds of other people. Athough the practitioner's experience, education, and credentials are important, psychotherapy (my preferred term) is a person-to-person relationship before it is anything else. As in any relationship, client and therapist need to ask themselves, 'can I engage with this person'? I am convinced that no matter what other useful and important things are done in therapy, its effectiveness rests upon the human relationship within which everything else occurs. Research supports the importance of the relationship in psychotherapy. For me, psychotherapy is also a dialogue of depth, in the sense that no matter how the life problem or issue initially presents itself, it also connects to our deepest assumptions about life, and raises questions about how we should live, and what is meaningful to us. These are the kinds of questions which do not have immediate answers. I see therapy as incorporating qualities such as attentiveness, compassion, courage, and honesty. My intention as a therapist is to be as present as possible in order to explore carefully the challenges my clients are living with. My practice incorporates a democratic approach that accepts and welcomes those aspects of ourselves that are usually judged, exiled and ostracised, by ourselves and others. Therapy is ideally a refuge for 'thinking', underpinned by supportive listening. For me, 'thinking' is the ability to dwell with something that is initially confusing and unclear until it gradually reveals itself. This revelation usually brings a feeling of relief and enables new change to happen. Each person has an uniqueness that needs to be discovered gradually. I work with clients on all levels - cognitive, emotional, culturally, and existentially, in order to achieve lasting change. Please see my website for more information.