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Welcome to CLARITY of SELF

Are looking for a therapist who will work with you to explore your feelings in a safe and supported way?

Are you hoping to find help to wade through the hard feelings to get to a place where there is space for joy and hope?

This website describes my Canberra based clinical psychotherapy practice, Clarity of Self which offers:

Face to face, individual psychodynamic psychotherapy informed by psychoanalytic Self-Psychology and incorporating a body mind focus.

Body focused psychotherapy has been shown to be effective for the treatment of trauma (developmental and incident trauma), depression, anxiety, personality disorders, addictions and relationship issues.

Session information

Psychotherapy sessions are 50 minutes in length and are by appointment only.

Make a first appointment for us to meet and learn a bit about each other, then an initial 3 or 4 sessions is recommended to begin. It is important you feel I am someone you can work with.

The clinic – below is a picture of me and then the clinic – the building, the ground floor clinic door and then one of the chairs in my room at Thrive Therapies. The clinic space is private, quiet and calm. When you enter the building, go straight ahead across the foyer. The door to Thrive Therapies is directly ahead and to the left. Enter the clinic and wait in the waiting room which is directly to the right of the front door. This is a roomy and quiet space. I will collect you from the waiting room at the appointment time. Bathrooms are located in the building foyer to the left of the front door of the building as you enter. Parking is available in the surrounding streets and is meter parking. The clinic is close to the city so the bus and light rail are not far away.

Fees – My full fee is $120 per session. For private clients who are also concession holders I charge $80. Fees are due at the completion of the session and can be paid by cash, direct debit, or by credit card. Credit card payments attract a fee of 2%.

Karen Stewart

About Me

Karen has professional experience working in the areas of domestic violence, forensic psychotherapy, suicide bereavement, sudden death and loss, developmental trauma, parenting and behaviour management, out of home care, single incident trauma, special needs learning assistance, general wellbeing and relationship counselling (for full details see Professional Work History below).

With the combination of a sharp analytical mind and a sensitive and creative personality, Karen is a compassionate and effective psychotherapist.

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Philosophy

I believe that all people are innately creative and clever. Through our unique experiences in life, we have responded creatively and cleverly to survive and adapt to our situation and our lived history.

As children we may have withdrawn and hid, or ran, or fought, and we developed any number of techniques for survival of our selves – our precious, sensitive feeling selves, as well as our physical selves.

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Why Psychotherapy?

Because it works!

The aim of therapy is to make living our life easier. It is about working with someone to get to know yourself better, and ultimately make changes to patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving.
Psychotherapy provides a safe non-judgemental space in which to work on your self with the help of a qualified, empathic, nurturing and skilled person.

“In particular, the research indicates that body-focused psychotherapy is effective for a range of issues (Bloch-Atefi & Smith, 2014) including where talking therapies are unable to effectively treat the condition (Gordon et al., 2008; Röhricht, 2009).” (Thomas, 2018, p. 8 – see below).

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