Psychotherapy Services
My ethic as a psychotherapist includes a commitment to confidentiality and to providing a safe space. You can receive emotional support and explore new perspectives offered by an empathic professional trained to listen attentively to your experience.
I offer Psychotherapy Services for Adults who are:
- Feeling anxious or depressed
- Wanting satisfying relationships but having difficulties making and sustaining these
- Survivors of child sexual abuse
- Adopted and wanting to explore their personal identity
- Suffering from early childhood trauma
- Experiencing chronic low self-esteem and low self-confidence
- Bereaved and mourning the loss of a person or pet
- Navigating separation and divorce
- Facing major life transitions including ageing or changes in family and work life
- Experiencing ‘emotional numbness’ or disconnected mind-body states
- Searching for personal growth and greater meaning in their lives
Short-Term and Long-Term Psychotherapy
We will together consider your therapeutic needs and whether these might best be met by short-term work or by an open-ended in-depth approach.
Short-term psychotherapy consists of a set number of weekly sessions. We would identify your therapeutic goals and actively work within a framework of 12-16 sessions to resolve a particular problem area. At the end of this period we would assess whether your original treatment goals have been satisfactorily met or whether further intervention is needed.
In-depth psychotherapy facilitates healing and psychological growth by exploring your feelings, dreams, memories and the rejected or forgotten aspects of yourself. In-depth work encourages you to slow down, to look backwards to past childhood experiences as well as forwards to future aspects of yourself you would like to develop. A genuine opportunity emerges for changing self-defeating old patterns of behaviour, for attaining a deeper understanding of yourself and for welcoming new experiences into your life.
My specialist interests include:
Recovery from Early Childhood Trauma
What happens when primary caregivers in a young child’s life are emotionally rejecting or abusive? You may want to explore how originally unavailable or frightening caregivers have affected your sense of identity, your relationship with your body and your capacity to build satisfying relationships, including perhaps parenting your own children. Survivors of early emotional trauma may feel ‘emotionally numb’, believe they are ‘bad’ and avoid intimate relationships.
Therapy offers a safe space and a genuine second chance to transform early childhood trauma. Over time, the therapist-witness can help you to recover fragmented memories, express your truth and create a healthier more compassionate story about yourself.
Individuation: personal growth and transformation
Individuation is “only experienced by those who have gone through the… indispensable business of coming to terms with the unconscious components of the personality” (C. J. Jung, 1954).
As we get older many of us find ourselves feeling stagnant, stuck and grappling not with a specific problem but with a wider search for meaning in our lives. Jung refers to this search as ‘Individuation’ or our lifelong striving for psychological growth, personal meaning and awareness of unconscious parts of ourselves. Individuation involves turning our attention inwards to the feelings, dreams, images, fantasies and symbols thronging through our lives. Creative expression of this raw material is promoted through telling stories, writing, drawing or playing.
Individuation invites us to then reflect deeply and come to terms with the meanings of our inner experiences. Weaving together conscious reflection and unconscious parts of ourselves promotes new growth towards a more conscious whole individual who contributes to society.
If you feel called to explore the individuation process, I offer an ethical creative space wherein to undertake the transformative journey towards embracing your true inner self.