I offer a dependable, safe space in which you can be both supported and challenged in exploring the nature of your difficulties and what factors are preventing change
My psychotherapy contract begins with a three-session ‘extended consultation’ that provides the opportunity for exploration of your difficulties and places them in the context of your everyday life and relationships, your formative early experiences and significant life events. The consultation gives you an experience of how I work and enables you to judge whether I, and the psychotherapy I offer, can be helpful to you.
I am a Full Member of the Institute of Group Analysis and I regularly provide training and run workshops for psychotherapists and postgraduate clinical psychology trainees.
Relationship difficulties - personal or work-related
Feeling an "outsider" in groups
"Unaccountable" feelings or the absence of any feelings
Depression
Anxiety
Anger
Grief including delayed or unresolved grief reactions
Boredom
Childhood trauma and adversity
Difficulties in knowing one's own mind
Conflicting feelings
Dependence
Avoidance
Individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy provides you with the opportunity to say whatever comes into your mind, free from the normal social constraints and judgement.
It allows you to notice your different and sometimes contradictory thoughts, feelings and behaviours and to consider the origins of these. My role as a psychotherapist is help you make connections and see patterns and meaning in what you feel or don’t feel.
The benefits of psychotherapy arise from coming to know one’s mind, accepting feelings however uncomfortable they seem, and learning how to exercise choice in one’s life and relationships.
In a couple relationship we can find our mood and behaviours strongly affected by our partner. We might also notice that we and our partner can think very differently and that our emotional responses and sense of what is important leads us to be at odds with one another. We can find ourselves in repeating patterns of behaviour that we wish to change but feel powerless to do so.
Couple psychotherapy provides a safe setting in which freer communication and listening enables problems in a relationship to be examined coolly. Exploration of early significant relationships and life events for each partner, and within the relationship itself, facilitate re-evaluation patterns of relating and our choices about changing them.
An analytic group provides the opportunity of learning how to belong and how to be more fully oneself in the presence of others. Group analysis can help when we experience ourselves as an outsider - in our families, in our social groups and in our workplaces. We can learn to overcome our internal constraints against expressing ourselves more authentically and become more accepting of our own and others' differences.
The confidentiality and special conditions of an analytic group, comprised of up to eight members, facilitate deep personal communicating, develops insight to our mind and the minds of others and also ‘outsight’ as to how we are perceived and experienced by others.