Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy can take many different forms and is currently practiced by many different practitioners, informed by many different theoretical backgrounds. Depending on what you are looking for in therapy or what makes sense to you, you may be looking for a therapist that will tell you exactly what you should do to fix your problems, engage you in self-expressive pursuits such as painting designed to uncover personal understandings, or, you may be looking for someone to talk to about your life experiences with all their triumphs and challenges, in the hopes of coming to know and accept yourself more fully in truly liberating ways.

There has been a resurgence in interest lately in the significant benefits shown to result from psychodynamic or “Insight” therapies. It is believed that unconscious motives, instinctive evolutionary drives and other compelling forces, outside of conscious awareness, are responsible for the vast majority of repetitive negative behaviours and ineffective, unsatisfactory ways of us each engaging with the world and one another. Given that these theoretical “drives” are unconscious, which means inaccessible to awareness, reducing their impact on us can be a very difficult task, since they form the very hard-wiring of ingrained neural-networks in our brains that define who we are, what we like, how we act and what we feel is capable for us.

During the 80’s and 90’s, it was for a time believed that problems could be trained away without any need to uncover or understand their origins and motives. Simply put, CBT and other behavioural modification therapies were an alluring concept that promised to change your life experience by merely changing your actions, without respect to the reasons why you felt the way you felt and ignoring how you came to feel this way. In other words, effectively placing both the source of problems and their solution squarely on you. As an insight oriented psychotherapist, I understand that the drive to engage in maladaptive patterns of behaviours, will not disappear, just by working hard at not behaving a certain way, which is why addiction programs for example, often include insight oriented, self-reflective therapy, meditation and group therapy rather than merely providing techniques aimed at breaking addictions.

There is more to your mind, or any human mind for that matter, than can be uncovered by a questionnaire. What you do not yet realize about yourself cannot be addressed, cannot be understood and is therefore difficult to change. It is sometimes a lengthy endeavour to coax out buried memories and put words to pre-verbal experiences, however, even practitioners of “exorcisms” agree, naming your “demons” is a powerful step in taking away their power. There is a wealth of supporting evidence to show that insight oriented therapies are far more effective than cognitive behavioural approaches, however, quick fixes can be immediately beneficial short term, even if they are not sustainable throughout life.

It’s been repeatedly shown in numerous research studies that insight approaches to therapy are generally more effective in the long run than short term techniques. It is also well documented that emotional disclosure is associated with better immune functioning, which is vital to life. Evidence continues to mount, that releasing or discharging pent-up emotions through expressing them often reduces stress, which makes sense since there is always some degree of physical arousal in holding in or hiding guilt, shame, secrets and sins. Tension of any kind, does not make for a comfortable life or a comfortable relationship and is not condusive to an optimally operating nervous system or immune system.

Simply put, good psychotherapy is part of a healthy self care program, that works in tandem with good medical care and a healthy lifestyle.

My role as a therapist is not merely the provision of a confessional ear, a holding environment for your feelings, a sounding board for your thoughts or a non-judgmental presence in your life. Listening is a significant part of my responsibility to you, but there is a great deal more to an effective therapeutic alliance. My commitment to understand your particular situation and to help you work through whatever you have gone through, or whatever you are going through, is paramount. A large part of our work together may be the uncovering of old, un-worked through “stuff” that can be impacting your life, locked away out of conscious awareness. Once recognized, all the old tangles and unconscious influences that were previously unavailable for further processing, can be re-assessed and reintegrated in their newly understood, far less powerful form.

My focus is purely on your cognitive and emotional well-being. Thoughts and feelings. We can look at how your thoughts and feelings are affected by, or contribute to your actions (exercise, eating eating, smoking, recreational drug consumption, arguing, angry outbursts, cutting/self-harm, destructive habits etc), but the care of you physical body should be entrusted to a professional specializing in this area.

If you are committed to the therapeutic process, you can learn to trust me, you are able to speak your mind and you are willing to do the work, then you stand an excellent chance of benefitting greatly from therapy with me.

First and foremost, I do not impose a medical diagnosis or my subjective beliefs on you. I do not profess to possess all the answers to life and I do not insist on knowing exactly what you should do, given your unique past and specific situation. I cannot make guarantees or predications relating to how effective you will find engaging in a therapeutic process with me will be. I also cannot predict how long your therapy will take as there are way too many variables involved, including: your specific history, your depth of engagement in the process, the relational influences in your life, how you feel about me, how you feel about you, how you feel about us, etc. etc. These are among the possible things that we may discover together after we have begun our shared journey, exploring your life, your thoughts and feelings and how everything about the you that you know relates to the world and it’s culturally diverse inhabitants.

There are no guarantees with any therapeutic method. Even in the field of psychology (the study of the mind), there are no areas of scientific research that can claim to have discovered anything with a 100% degree of certainty. If this is hard to imagine, consider for a moment, the myriad of potential, unpredictable, unpleasant and often harmful side-effects associated with even the most common and “reliable” drugs that, 100% of the time, accompany 100% of the drugs advertised or administered. In some circumstances, drugs can provide temporary help, but in the long term, it’s just like they say: Drugs are not the answer.

I am not licensed to prescribe medication of any kind, neither can I advise you of your nutritional requirements. There are lots of excellent, well trained nutritionists and naturopaths available that can attend to the needs of your body, you will find some of them listed in my resources section.