We are not solely our histories or our experiences. However, by looking at our history and experiences in relation to how we are in the present we can learn to manage better what life brings, no matter how difficult. We can learn to make conscious choices and deal with the tensions and dilemmas that arise in relating to others and our sense of self. Most of us will have times in our lives when we need to seek support, or find someone with the skills, knowledge and experience to help us, to help ourselves. In the therapy space we can explore together patterns of thought and behaviours, conflicted feelings, paradoxes, meanings, images and metaphors, as well as specific problems and issues for you as a client. Working to bring together and expand your knowledge and experience of your body, heart, mind and spirit as it manifests in our work together.
Areas covered in psychotherapy and counselling can include
Relationships and couple work /dynamics
Difference, diversity and synthesis in psychotherapy and group work
Parallel, transferential and transpersonal processes
System-centred awareness, phenomenological field processes and sub-groupings
Systemic understandings including influences from family of origin, culture and heritage
Psychosomatic and transpersonal woundings and understandings
Stress and stress-related illnesses, including eating disorders
PTSD and somatic processing
Large group processes
Group and team facilitation and management
Voice and movement as therapeutic intervention
Remedial behavioural bodywork and body-mind cognition
Working with creativity and performance
About approaches taken
Integrative body psychotherapy, gestalt psychotherapy, and other co-created experience-acknowledging approaches, are in receipt of increased neuro-psychological understandings and support for their methods and thinking; this support helps to keep my work informed, contemporary and in the realms of identifiable outcomes from the perspective of the client. Gestalt in particular, as part of its history, has cognitive and behavioural roots and thus also has an added orientation toward action and activation of experience, as well as a grounding in wider psychological and philosophical roots.
Safety, safeguarding and confidentiality
In line with my digital policy I ask clients and potential clients to keep their personal emotional / process information to a minimum on any emails and texts (as these are not secured communications). By doing this it allows us to hold the confidentiality of the relationship more securely and to maintain our face to face meetings as the place of sharing. Our sessions will be confidential, allowing you to explore your thoughts, plans, ideas and feelings privately.*
*There is one exception to the confidentiality of our work, if I have a reasonable belief that you are in real danger of harming yourself or another I will need to break our confidentiality agreement; usually this would be discussed with you and options for how you are going to handle the situation would be explored. I will always ask for contact details for you and for the name and address of your general practitioner or other health professional when we start a therapeutic relationship; this is specifically for your safety should you become unwell whilst working with me.