What does therapy offer?

Therapy offers a confidential, professional service which is private and safe. We work collaboratively together, with respect and openness.

We all at certain times in our life need help with problems and difficulties that arise. For example, if your washing machine broke down, you would call in a repair expert, that's no different to going to a psychotherapist/counsellor for help with psychological problems.

Therapy can offer an opportunity for reflection, gaining awareness and exploration to assist in our personal growth and development. In changing the way we think, we can change the way we feel, which can then change our behaviour, focusing on better ways to deal with enables us to generate and reach different goals.

Couples therapy can be for a crisis moment, general help, communication issues, or for any disruption within the couple to help you back to harmony. We can also use couples therapy to enhance our relationship, moving on after retirement, or major life changes, when the children leave home and much more. We can work at seeing from other perspectives, making changes, meeting each others needs, seeing how we trigger our partner and understanding how we may sabotage or use maladaptive patterns. We can also understand our attachment patterns, languages of love, different communication styles and how we can derail ourselves in arguments. I follow the Gottman Method for Couples Therapy as it has the benefit of three decades of research and practice in clinical settings. I also use David Schnarch`s methods, being very clear with the interactions and how we entangle ourselves in the relating game, including where this comes from and how to break free. He has many useful books to aid the process. More recently I am integrating the work of Terry Real, relational life therapy and his most recent book US.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a psychological approach based on scientific principles and research suggests that it can be effective for a wide range of problems. The counsellor and client work together to identify and understand the problems, in order to work through difficulties, to understand the link between thoughts, feelings and behaviour. During times of distress, we can judge situations and difficulties in a different way than when things are ok.

When we are growing up, we learn about ourselves, the world, and others around us by our experiences that happen to us. From these experiences we develop core beliefs, rules, a life story, identity, and personality traits. These beliefs and rules can sometimes cause us problems as adults, which we are not so conscious of, and we can be triggered in certain situations/circumstances in different ways. Therapy can help us to see and understand our beliefs, rules, past story, and personality traits to help us understand about our problems, the meanings we give them and how to manage them better. When we see more of what was unconscious to us, we have more choice of how to respond in the moment. We try to understand the interpretations that we make also, the assumptions and filtering so that we can see the bigger picture and decide how best to handle things. We can also reframe our beliefs and thoughts and develop more realistic, more helpful and real for the now (rather than carry them from the past) for the life we have now.

Differentiation focuses on helping you to tolerate anxiety while facing issues head on, all the while improving your ability to self soothe while you hear and say difficult things. It also involves improving your ability to hold onto your sense of self while maintaining the relationship. This also requires you to be able to balance your needs and self-identity with that of your partner – and vice versa.

Some of the main concepts and terms created by Dr. David Schnarch identified in Crucible focused therapy include:

• Emotional gridlock – which occurs when you cannot agree to disagree and feel that you can no longer compromise.

• Normal marital sadism – which are the typical mean, sarcastic and spiteful things that couples tend to say and do to each other – both sexually and non-sexually.

• Self and Other validated intimacy – self validated intimacy is about sharing your thoughts and feelings to your partner and other validated intimacy is when your partner accepts those thoughts and feelings.

• Collaborative alliance – you, your partner, and the therapist have the same goals.

• Other concepts for you and your partner learn about and explore!

By using these concepts in couples and in individual work, the therapist will ultimately push you and your partner outside of your comfort zone and develop new comfort zones by becoming more emotionally able to respond in the now and continue to have a good attachment, even when triggered. This helps us keep our autonomy and relationship with others in balance - staying authentic.

Longer term therapy:

Longer term therapy is less directed and allows more time on memories, the past, working with the shadow side and unconscious material. It`s said that the force of the unconscious can become destructive, or self-sabotaging if it remains unconscious. Sometimes it is difficult to recognise because it is unconscious and can bring with it a charge of emotion, which we find difficult to pass through, without reacting to. The shadow side (unconscious) can take a lot of our energy. When we work through this and make the unconscious conscious, we then have many more choices, much more awareness and we are not caught out. It can be that your shadow side brings you into therapy, because you keep sabotaging yourself and yet don`t want to for an example.

Often therapy provides relief by helping us to understand our own part in suffering, changes patterns of behaviours and to develop new strategies. We often meet with resistance when doing the deeper work, however together we find our way through and heal the fragmented parts of the self. We then find freedom, liberation, and clarity aiding us to become the best versions of ourselves. With connection to ourselves and understanding why we get stuck, we are able to change and free ourselves from the old patterns and sabotage. Also tying up lose ends from the past and integrating the fragmented parts of ourselves allows us to move on and live more fully in the present moment - that`s where we find contentment and inner fulfilment.

Mind & Body together:

Incorporating mind and body work together for our awareness and healing. This helps us to become more aware of how our thoughts and the meaning we give them show up in the body and then our behaviour. This inside out work also helps us to see how our past experiences are sometime still having an effect on us too. Learning to dialogue with your body is a great source of information and when we see this, we can work with at transforming it. Interoception is “the process by which the nervous system senses, interprets, and integrates signals originating from within the body, providing a moment-by-moment mapping of the body’s internal landscape across conscious and unconscious levels” (Khalsa et al., 2018). This feedback loop of incoming and outgoing information between the brain and body has also been called our “sixth sense.” The brain’s ability to register, interpret, and integrate bodily signals is undoubtedly consequential for our well-being, self-regulation, mental health and social connection.

Combining therapy and mindfulness sessions: Would you like to wake up your senses, connect and create a sense of harmony with life. Using our 5 senses helps us to wake up, connect and listen to the messages inside more, even just standing outside for a moment: listening, looking, smelling, touching (and tasting). The therapeutic work and relationship stays the same, so even if we take our session outside in nature for a walk and talk session, or just stand outside we remain very focused. It can also help the constant chatter in our heads to quieten, allowing us to see more clearly what`s important. Using movement and the nature can help us to reconnect - this can help the therapeutic process, as become more in a flow and dialogue with ourselves more deeply.

Awakening to Reality:

The cherry blossom tree has to shed it`s flowers & old leaves to be able to grow new ones next year.

Our internal landscape can dictate our behaviour, often without us consciously realising it. So when we learn to wake up, we learn what really serves us well - practice what nourishes you, rather than what depletes you. Choose which path you wish to be on = success or failure path.

Our thoughts can hold us victim to our past experiences & then we can stuck in them.

The conditioned mind: We perceive the world through our lens, through our experiences our brains developed - we have the option to awaken from our minds past construction. What was learnt, can be unlearnt and we can relearn new. As the saying goes - what fires, wires, meaning what you are thinking creates your pathways. When you change habits, your brain rewires. So we can learn to be selective, because the mind wants to go back to what is familiar, which isn`t always what we want going forwards.

Become your own master to yourself - acting with loving kindness and generosity to ones own needs, can help us to make better choices.

The Work:

Its not easy to go through therapy, and, keep going……… but the rewards are amazing and who does not want to live more freely, with ease, peace, and with clarity in any given moment, no matter what is happening. We often shy away from the deeper work because its uncomfortable, but, when we pause and see through the smoke screen then we are often encouraged to keep going, like a bite of the nice pie we want more because it feels good afterwards. We can peel the layers off that don`t no longer serve you well, or align with your desire now. (The mind can sometimes reflect the scar, every time you do something different, you are building new and different for your life moving forwards. )

We often seem to chase things to try to be happy, only to find they only give limited happiness and then very quickly it goes. We often cling to things, or people for the same feel good reasons. We can also develop unhelpful patterns in life which keeps us stuck - sometimes we need to pause, step back and see clearly, then we can make better choices. Therapy can help to unravel, see past the smoke screen, change patterns, make changes and rewrite the stories in our heads which can also replay forever.

When we have a near death experience, it often wakes us up, it certainly gives us a second chance - and then we want to live a `No bullshit` life. I certainly want to choose well and have more meaning after mine - it`s often our pasts which can stop this from happening = the smoke screen. When we see well, we choose well, when we are clear about how the mind works and malfunctions, we can bypass the things which hold us back etc.

Life can sometimes hold up a mirror for our awakening if we are ready to see.

The moment in front of us is the only moment we have to make a choice, a different choice which serves us well.

If the past calls, let it go to voicemail, coz it has nothing new to say :) and in therapy we have space to work through this and turn it into our gift, our move forward, our freedom.……..

When we`ve had trauma we often get stuck in in the pain and stay stuck in the distress, then the body reacts to this - it can become a vicious circle.

Lets end the struggle with yourself.

Trauma Work:

Moving beyond trauma and finding yourself authentic self

Moving beyond trauma can be a journey of self discovery to find your true authentic self underneath what has been embodied. Deciding to work through your past trauma takes courage and a willingness to show up for yourself. We will go on a journey together, exploring many angles and using many different techniques to overcome your past and help you live more freely in the now.

Are you wanting to live your life from free choice, on your terms, being who you were truly meant to be, not how you got taught to be:

• Do you want to live in the now, be present & show up for your life?

• Do you want to gain inner trust, belief & faith in yourself?

• Do you want to intensify your inner power & connect to yourself fully - so you are not held back in unhelpful patterns?

• Do you want to access your inner wisdom & knowledge in your daily life?

• Do you want to learn how to listen to the messages which your body sends you constantly & reclaim your inner balance?

• Do you want to unlearn self-doubt, guilt & sabotage?

• Do you want to free yourself from past anger & hurt, from unhelpful patterns & uncertainty?

• Do you want to use daily triggers & difficulties as gifts rather than pushing away & feeling like a victim? (Turning poison into medicine, turning events into lessons, letting interactions teach you & aid your life, rather than hold you back)

• Do you want to be free & walk your own path with confidence, grace & joy?

• Do you want to be more effortlessly happy & content no matter what is actually happening?

After 26 years of working as a therapist and equal years of meditation/mindfulness, and, a life time of seeking the truth - I can share all I know with you and I am privileged to keep learning from each and every client who I work with. Some people come into our lives for a short period and leave a big imprint in our hearts, others stay longer and leave a different imprint, I see that we all impact each other and there, right there, are the most valuable lessons in front of us all - lets learn from them and use them to help set us free.

As Ram Dass says, “ Be here now”.

"All the past and future—everything you always were is in this moment. All of your commitments for the future are in this moment. The fullness of this moment includes everything; it doesn't exclude. It doesn't exclude past and future. All we're dealing with is the problem that the human mind clings. The clinging of the human mind takes it into time and into space, and it takes it away from the fullness of the moment. So that in the most exquisite practice, like the practice of Vipassana, one keeps extricating oneself from identification with thoughts about past and future by noting them and then coming back to the present moment. The reason the breath is so good to work with is it's always around, it's right there, and it's easy." – Ram Dass on the practice of 'being here now'

I am not a spiritual teacher, although it can have flavours of this practice, because when we go into the now, into the origins of how, why we got derailed it can touch many practices, many angles and many different models of therapy - “I am a collection of all my life, all of my life’s experiences, all of my trainings, including all of the teachers who have impacted me and nothing is separate from the other”, Sharon Mills.

Releasing shame is empowering and when we move past our conditioned selves, to become connected to our true selves, we are able to see our journey more clearly.

Love/Rage, Pleasure/Pain, Happy/Sad, black/white - opposites are interesting to understand and linked to doing inner shadow work, they can help to show the way to what is still unknown, hidden, or pushing us to act out…….. Let`s wake up to some of the mysteries of life and being a human being.

We often keep falling into old patterns and then become hard on ourselves - we will work on seeing these patterns more deeply and clearly so that we are able to cross over the pavement and not fall in each time.

“I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost... I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn't my fault.
It still takes me a long time to get out.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in. It's a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault. I get out immediately.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

I walk down another street.”
―Portia Nelson,There's a Hole in My Sidewalk: The Romance of Self-Discovery

Challenges for Therapy:

It can be challenging to make change happen. I often get clients coming having done lots of past therapy and still struggling for deeper, longer lasting change. Sometimes we can get stuck in the past where something was overwhelming and we weren’t able to process it fully and move on. By revisiting the difficult moment, we are able to free this up, see our blind spots and where we get stuck.

There is a saying in Buddhism “No mud, no lotus.” The lotus flower blossoms in the mud, opening up and blossoming there in the mud. Finding inner bliss and peace while we may come from muddy places. It can be one a core teaching that nature provides for us when we come from difficult backgrounds, we can shine, blossom and be free to embody ourselves as we truly are if we work through the trauma and seek the truth. If we dont run away from our shadow side, the dark side they say, because its where we put all the rubbish that we didn`t want, or that which was just too painful to bear at the time.

Finding our infinite treasure from deep inside of us helps us to set ourselves free and live an authentic life …………….

“Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you, as a result of what happens to you.”

— Gabor Maté

Differentiation is the ability to balance the autonomy and the attachment so it is not an either/or. The ability to not be caught up in our childhood drama when the triggers in the now, trigger something from the past – being free to respond in the now.

“Stagnation is the foundation of all pathology”, The yellow emerpor`s classic of medicine, by Maoshing N.I.