Psychotherapy
What is right for you?
Psychotherapy can be short or long term.
If you are interested in short term psychotherapy then we will work on targeted areas of your life as well as working on your life story. We will work to piece together this story or narrative so you can see and reflect on patterns of behaviour and how they may have developed in your family of origin. Then we can begin to find ways to consider change.
Long term psychotherapy usually begins in the same way as short-term work by uncovering your life story. Then dreamwork is a helpful support for looking into the dark and frightening aspects of life. These shadowy aspects of our personality often cause us to behave in ways we don’t like or recognise or drive our addictions, obsessions and compulsions. In the shadows we often place parts of our personality that have been unacceptable to our care givers and peers. This approach focuses both on early development and relationships as well as the idea that each person has potential not yet realised. This approach often helps you to feel more alive, more energised and able to fulfil your potential.
In both long term and short-term psychotherapy I often use the notion of the ‘felt sense’. This is a process of inviting you to notice and attend to the bodily felt experience of a particular moment. Psychotherapy works best when we are able to access and allow our feelings, sensations and emotions into the therapeutic process.
Therapeutic Work
There are many kinds of psychotherapy and analysis and so it is important that you find something that suits you. The kind of work I do is creative and nourishing in that we will work with where you are now, and develop a ‘symbolic’ understanding of your current life circumstances which can embrace the past and provide a vision of the future. I am a Jungian Analyst which means have have been through a rigorous and extensive training programme with the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists, UK. I am also an Authentic Movement teacher and Focusing Trainer so I often work with somatic symptoms, body based processes as well as with dreams and your life experiences. I am on the Faculty of Janet Adler’s teacher training programme for those wishing to become teachers of Authentic Movement. I have a private practice in Northampton and London, UK.
Carl Jung developed his approach to psychotherapy based on the idea that every individual has both conscious and unconscious contents and that often we leave parts of our personality to one side because of traumatic events or socialising and this can often mean we become one-sided resulting in feeling unhappy, unfulfilled, depressed, angry or lonely. The key to finding and working with the ‘whole’ of our personality, Jung believed, can be discovered in our dreams. Learning more about ourselves through dream analysis helps to connect us to a wider cosmic view where we are a part of the past, present and future.
Gene Gendlin discovered that individuals who could connect to a ‘felt sense’ of how they were in a given situation were best placed to respond the psychotherapy. With this in mind he developed ‘Focusing’. This is a very simple tool that allows you to access how you are in your body/mind right now and then find ways to language that ‘felt sense’ and develop tools for carrying forward this fuller sense of yourself into your life. Once you learn how to Focus it is easy to do alone or with a partner. This is a self-development tool that can be applied specific life problems, creative blocks or more general psychotherapeutic work.
Initial Consultation
Whether you think you want to work on a short term basis or long term, the initial step is to contact me by email or telephone and then arrange an initial consultation. Then, if we both feel we can work together, we will be working to discover the difference between the self who remembers and what is remembered, seeking out a meaningful way to remember forwards into your life. The process is designed to suit you as you are right now and as you know yourself to be.
As A.S. Byatt says in the forward to her edited collection Memory (2008), “remembering forwards – the way in which a composer, or a painter, can envisage and then make something new, by remembering and reshaping something earlier…the way the mind moves forward and back” (p.xvi). This, it seems to me, is the creative work of working with mind and body towards healing.
I am registered with and adhere to the ethical rules and regulations as established by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapists and by the International Association of Analytical Psychologists.
For more information telephone (07784 140244) or email me for an initial consultation.