Welcome
Drug companies spend billions educating (and misinforming) consumers about the potential benefits of their products. What most people know about therapy, however, comes from televisions shows and movies that depict therapists as benign bunglers, sexual predators, or competent folks who just can't say no to helping mobsters. It is strange but true that people still come to therapy not knowing what to expect, and asking the same question: "How can talking help?" Deborah Anna Luepnitz - Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy and Its Dilemmas (2002)
This website has been designed with the intention of providing you with an overview of how I work. It it also intended to give some insight into how talking helps.
I am a consultant psychologist/psychotherapist with over fifteen years experience of working with individuals, couples and families, in a range of public and private health settings.
I have degrees in psychology, counselling psychology and relationship counselling (Masters Degree in Couple & Family Therapy) and have combined this academic experience with what I have learned from my own experience of being a patient in psychotherapy, of being a psychotherapist offering help to others, of being a practitioner of Zen meditation, and a teacher of mindfulness meditation.
What’s on offer?
(For details of marriage counselling and mindfulness meditation click on the relevant links).
Essentially, after an initial assessment period during which we try to figure out what it is that needs attention, I offer one of two related services, these are counselling and psychotherapy. In practice the difference is somewhat academic but for the sake of clarity the difference are as follows.
While at times a patient presenting for counselling may end up continuing in psychotherapy they generally have more clearly defined problems and goals which can be worked through to a reasonable conclusion in a relatively short period of time (say between ten and twelve sessions).
By contrast, patients presenting for psychotherapy may be experiencing more severe symptoms and/or levels of distress, combined with difficulties in several areas of their lives. Or they may be struggling with a particular pattern of behaviour, and/or way of being, which tends to get repeated over time, most typically in significant relationships. Patients presenting for psychotherapy may also want to dig deeper to explore more existential concerns about their identity, their values and/or their intentions in life.
The process of psychotherapy is somewhat akin to that of tidying a disordered room, where the disarrayed objects are our scattered and conflicting, conscious and unconscious, thoughts, beliefs, feelings and actions. Through talking, the scattered objects of our inner world are first identified and then arranged into some kind of order, so that we can examine them from a fresh perspective. However, this process is complicated by the fact that despite our coming to therapy in the hope of changing, a part of us also wants to remain the same, and so new perspectives or understandings are often resisted, either because they challenge long held beliefs (about life and about ourselves), or because these new understandings also bring with them new responsibilities. None-the-less, if we persist with the process, of integrating new understandings, then our approach to life, and our ways of relating to other people, will gradually shift to the point where we begin to find ourselves: more conscious of our experience; more creative in our responses; better able to engage with life's challenges; and more responsive to life's pleasures.
For further information or to make an appointment please follow the links to the right of this page.