Clinical Psychologist Dubai
With 20 years of experience as a clinical psychologist, I relocated to the United Arab Emirates in 2019. I offer therapy for adults struggling with depression, anxiety, painful experiences, negative thoughts, uncomfortable emotional states, unhealthy behaviours, and complex relationship patterns. Practicing as a clinical psychologist in Dubai, a multi-cultural metropolis, affirms the universality of humankind – similar mental health issues occur across all nationalities.
What Do You See?
The image at the top of the page can be viewed as a rabbit or a duck. It illustrates that what we apprehend is not always accurate, particularly when it comes to the factors underlying our mental health.
The Case for Therapy
We all experience psychological distress that can at times become impossible to deal with on our own. Starting therapy requires the courage to admit that something is not working in our lives.
My Approach
My approach is psychodynamic. It works with unconscious patterns, internalized images of early relationships, trauma, relational dynamics, and defensive strategies that shape current difficulties. Understanding them is the first step toward change.
Aims of Therapy
There are two primary aims of Psychodynamic Therapy:
1. Developing Greater Insight
The development of greater psychological insight begins with talking about your current difficulties and the history that shapes them. Through this, your underlying patterns of feeling and reacting come into view as the present is linked to the past.
You may wonder how the past shapes the present. We all experience its influence when a remark or tone of voice evokes unexpected emotions, skewed perceptions, and defensive responses. When a small remark produces a large reaction, the size of the reaction usually points to something older that has been touched.
You are encouraged to freely express your thoughts, feelings, and experiences in sessions. I offer observations, and your feedback helps to clarify how these patterns work and what they protect against. e.g. exploring how past rejection shapes current distrust and serves a protective function.
Therapy brings into view the patterns that have been operating without your knowing, and the experiences from which they took shape. Understanding alone does not undo them, but it makes the changes that follow possible.
2. Actively Applying Insight
Insight alone rarely produces change. Many people arrive at therapy expecting that understanding why they are the way they are will be sufficient — that once the source of a difficulty is identified, the difficulty will resolve. This expectation is intuitive, but does not match how psychological change actually occurs.
The patterns psychodynamic therapy addresses are emotional, automatic, and often laid down before words could be put to them. They operate fastest when you are under stress, in conflict, or close to someone — exactly the situations in which thinking clearly is hardest. Insight provides the map, but the work of changing direction has to be done in the moment, again and again, until the new way becomes familiar.
The work in this phase takes several forms:
· Present perceptions are recognised as shaped by templates from earlier relationships. For example, a work difficulty no longer reads as simple failure but as activating older messages about adequacy carried since childhood.
· Difficult feelings are tolerated rather than discharged defensively. For example, frustration that would once have produced withdrawal or sharp words is held long enough to understand what one is responding to.
· Defences become visible as they operate. For example, a difficult conversation that would once have ended in withdrawal can be stayed with and met directly.
· What is felt to come from another is recognised as originating within oneself. For example, criticism that seems to come from a colleague turns out, on examination, to be partly self-criticism cast outward.
· The harsh internal voice is recognised as belonging to an earlier relationship rather than to current reality. For example, the voice that calls one inadequate is heard as the echo of a parent or teacher whose standards were long ago internalised.
· Others' mental states are held in mind as distinct from one's own. For example, during a disagreement, imagining what the other person might be feeling and thinking, rather than assuming.
Three changes typically follow. Distress lessens because what once felt overwhelming can now be understood and met. Repeated patterns that have shaped your relationships, choices, and sense of self begin to weaken their hold. Your relationships with others change as you bring greater clarity to how you experience and respond to them.