Therapeutic Approach
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Consulting with a psychologist is a very personal experience and I focus on creating a welcoming and supportive environment. The first session explores your current difficulties, childhood, family history, significant life events, and the impact of past experiences. This allows me to explore your underlying psychological dynamics by developing links between the present and the past.
You may wonder how the past shapes the present. We all experience its influence when triggered by the words or actions of others. Triggers operate by evoking unexpected emotions, distorted thinking, and defensive responses. These psychological reactions usually indicate that unconscious dynamics are at play.
Therapy builds on the first-session history-taking through conversations where you are encouraged to freely express your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Interpretations are offered, and your feedback helps to clarify the operation and function of specific dynamics e.g. exploring how past rejection shapes current distrust and assists to protect you.
The initial aim of these therapeutic conversations is to deepen insight into your psychological processes. This is followed by assisting you to actively apply this insight in your everyday life. Therapy supports effecting change in the following ways:
· Reframing distorted thoughts to align with reality e.g. revising the idea that a work difficulty defines self-worth.
· Regulating emotional responses to match the situation e.g. expressing frustration appropriately by recognizing its ties to early experiences.
· Actively modifying defences e.g. direct communication instead of withdrawal.
· Reclaiming projections in real-time e.g. identifying a critical attitude projected onto a current interaction.
· Reducing negative self-talk by modifying the inner critic e.g. softening an internalized image of a critical parent.
· Considering your own and others’ mental states to improve communication e.g. thinking yourself into the mindset of the other party during a disagreement.
The combination of insight and action helps you to shift unhealthy psychological dynamics by reshaping aspects of your inner makeup. This enables you to gain deeper self-understanding, reduce levels of distress, stop repeating unwanted patterns, and interact with others from a position of greater clarity.
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
Sigmund Freud
What we learn about the child and the adult through psychoanalysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these earlier ones, and that every child in the first years of life goes through an immeasurable degree of suffering.
Melanie Klein
It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil.
Ronald Fairbairn
Your emotional life is not written in cement during childhood. You write each chapter as you go along.
Harry Stack Sullivan
The precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face.
Donald Winnicott
We’re only as needy as our unmet needs.
John Bowlby
If a new result is to have any value, it must unite elements long since known, but till then scattered and seemingly foreign to each other, and suddenly introduce order where the appearance of disorder reigned.
Wilfred Bion
During the second half of the first year, regulation of arousal and emotion no longer depend simply on what the caregiver does, but on how the infant interprets the caregiver’s accessibility and behaviour.
Peter Fonagy