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As children we may have withdrawn and hid, or ran, or fought, and we developed any number of techniques for survival of our selves – our sensitive feeling selves, and our physical selves. Psychotherapy helps to uncover the ‘hiding in plain sight’ and the well hidden, clever, stubborn, entrenched strategies that no longer serve us well.
Psychotherapy aims to help us feel more content and to enable us to act with more freedom in our day to day life. The goal of psychotherapy is to ease our pain and suffering, and to move towards more contended and appropriate feeling, thinking and behaving. We exist within a relational understanding of being a human. We are human in a world of other humans, as well as events and places and animals and things. We relate to all else from within our own sense of self, which is formed and changed in relationship with others.
I work from a psychodynamic perspective and where appropriate, include the somatic, or internal body awareness. This means we may explicitly explore how your body informs you and our work. An awareness of being in your body is an essential dimension to be included in psychotherapeutic work. I may suggest a simple gentle movement to help to explore further what you are feeling inside during a therapy session. One outcome of therapy is the development of your own awareness of what is going on inside for you – somatically, wholly. Apart from an explicit inclusion of the body, my practice is consistently informed by the ongoing awareness of my and our somatic intersubjective experience in the room.
I acknowledge that sometimes bodies can be maligned or demonised – by ourselves or by judgemental others (esp. with regards to somatisation and trauma histories), and I respect that we don’t always know why we experience what we do, and that there is much more to learn and understand about both physical and mental illness.
Collaboratively we will explore how the reactions of your body connect to your understanding of your experiences by sensing and working to find some words to inform us and our understanding of your experience.
I am trauma trained and work with gentle, safe methods:
– it is not necessary to be re-exposed to traumatic memories in order to heal from them. The aim of trauma informed psychotherapy is to create a safe ‘now’ and a hopeful contented future for you to move towards.
I work from a humanist perspective.
Humanism – Self-actualisation (or self-realisation), is a process of self discovery which leads to increased freedom in feeling, thinking, living and loving.
