Individual therapy is offered to clients experiencing depression,
anxiety, panic attacks and OCD symptoms across the age range. To start the work together, we will meet for
an initial session where we aim to form together an understanding of your
immediate needs as well as what you wish for your future. In that session we
will establish goals which you will have the opportunity to review as we continue
working together. You are a unique person and therefore, you will have the
opportunity to explore from generic descriptions of wellbeing and into your
preferred version of living and enjoying relationships with others. My work with clients may be either short term or long term, depending on
the individual needs and resources.
The aim of the sessions is to guide you to a place where your
issues feel resolved, irrelevant or perhaps resolving gradually and that
applies to difficulties in relationships. I encourage and assist my clients to
enhance their emotional wellbeing and understanding of what pins the issues
they face. More importantly, I aim to establish a plan by which you will
maintain the changes you need to make.
Therapy is not an easy journey and change quite often is an anxiety provoking word. The intention of my work is to enable you through talking to and working with a specialist to gain a greater awareness of how the problems were formed and more importantly what keeps them present your life.
Pick up the phone and make use of the 15 mins free phone consultation to make a start. That will offer the opportunity to discuss more on how this process can take shape.
Couple Therapy starts with a
phone call and an initial free 15 mins conversation to try to establish initial
reason for request, and the boundaries required for everyone to feel safe. The initial
session aims at clarifying couple’s interactional patterns that may have created
a problem or that may maintain a problem, already caused by other factors. In
most cases there is an individual initial session so that each person has the
opportunity to explore concerns, needs and hopes individually with the
therapist, and then a couple session where the same and other matters are
explored jointly. This will give us the opportunity to create a common
understanding of what the problem is, set goals for the couple work, a realistic
timeframe for this goals and agree on the frequency and number of sessions.
There is a growing evidence base
that shows us how effective couple therapy can be in addressing relationship
distress. That distress may be deriving by individual difficulties such as mood
disorders, anxiety disorders, addiction, chronic physical illness etc. that
subsequently have an impact on the couple attachment and relationship. It may
also be the sort of distress that keeps being present in the life of the couple
without any clear indication to what caused it in the first place or without an
understanding on how does it continue existing in the life of the couple
despite their efforts to resolve it. Another good argument for seeking couple
therapy is for couples with children to try to re-establish where their stand
as a couple in an intimate adult relationship while jointly performing the
parenting task.
Couple therapy aims at creating a space where each partner feels safe, feels listened to and understood, as opposed to judged. Whilst the therapist may make a statement towards a particular matter, the therapist doesn’t take sides in-between the partners. The interventions, that are informed by systemic psychotherapy, aim at decreasing behaviours that lead to a dysfunctional and unhappy relationship and increasing constructive communication patterns and emotional atunement between partners.
If you wish to enter into Family Therapy, I will meet with you as a family to gain an understanding of your concerns and to plan with you how we will address them in therapy. This initial process, at times requires more than one session and will allow us to grapple with what we need to prioritise in our work. This may happen in one or two initial meetings, in which we will set goals and plan our work together. Frequency of therapy varies from fortnightly to monthly.
Family Therapy helps family members to understand and support each other. It is a way of working that can help families when they’re struggling to find answers to problems and when their usual ways of coping with situations are not working. Families have reported finding it less difficult than anticipated and for me, as a therapist, it is paramount that I do my best in enabling each family member to feel safe in the room and more importantly to feel understood as opposed to feeling assessed or judged.
A systemic family therapist intends to join with you in individual and collective conversations to form an understanding of how you see your own family and how you understand the difficulties you are facing as a family. The therapists then helps the family to set out an agenda of priorities and goals for the work thereafter. What you will observe in the style of therapy is questions being asked to each family members and to the whole family that attends the session. These questions ultimately intend to shed light on potential solutions to the difficulties as well as on strengths in the values and relationships within the family.
This is a psychotherapeutic modality that involves all or some of the family members in the process of problem solving and addressing emotional difficulties. There is a growing body of evidence that shows that family therapy is helpful for individual suffering with Depression, Anxiety or Eating Disorders. www.aft.org.uk
My work with families is also influenced by ideas on Attachments, Behavioural Family Therapy and Mentalization.