The following are the approaches I may use in therapy to enable you to gain a better understanding of your self and your life.
Psychodynamic - This approach helps us to understand the impact our past early life experiences can have on our present situation. In therapy you will be helped to explore your own personal psychic developmental growth from childhood to the present, including the influence of subconsciously retained feelings and experiences and how these may have a bearing on any current difficulties. Through exploration of uncovered material, you may begin to understand how and why you are the person you are today. I believe that desired and enduring changes can only effectively take place when you have this insight and deeper understanding about yourself.
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy - This approach mainly involves looking at ways to change your thinking and behaviour patterns within your present experience. You will learn to identify the faulty and negative thoughts you currently have about situations and then identify new alternatives or different ways of thinking about them. Thinking more positively and realistically will in turn change the way you feel and also the way you behave. Including this approach in therapy will involve your considerable participation in the form of completing homework tasks, keeping detailed logs of your experience for reference and putting what you learn into practise as often as possible.
Transactional Analysis - This approach takes into account the roles we often unwittingly play within our relationships involving three different 'ego' states, namely our Parent, our Adult and our Child or PAC for short. It is usual for us to move between these states daily and quite naturally as we respond to circumstances and to the needs of those around us. Parenting involves us caring for others in a nurturing and also a critical way, a role we are probably most familiar with in the realm of childcare: our Adult concerns us being involved with others through discussion, negotiation, personal responsibility and decision making: our Child is evident when we play and joke with each other or experience a sense of freedom and spontaneity, but it can also involve us withholding and adapting our behaviour to meet the needs of others. When these roles lose their natural flow and remain fixed or static, preventing natural interplay to take place, conflicts between parties can arise. For example, one partner who remains as a Parent can inadvertently draw on their partners Child which can in turn lead to resentments and behaviours that are difficult to tolerate on a long term basis. When we identify our ability and need to move between these roles we can aim to make our relationships happier and healthier.
Person Centred -This approach is one that I feel underpins all therapy because fundamentally it is all about what you need to do and what is right for you in your particular circumstances. Specifically it encourages you to work out what areas you need to focus on and then to work out the best course of action to follow to resolve your issues and meet your needs. Within my Integrative practise I bear this in mind at all times but combine it with other approaches in order to make your therapeutic journey more productive, fulfilling and diverse.
Mindfulness - The inclusion of this concept is relatively new within therapeutic intervention but is something I have always felt to be a very important innate skill to remind ourselves of. I say 'remind' because essentially we all have the ability to be mindful of our present when we give ourselves the time to be, but very busy modern lives mean that we often spend alot of time planning ahead and thinking about what we are going to do rather than what we are actually doing, which may really be quite enjoyable if only we had noticed! Another human trait can be to spend time worrying about things in the past that have been unsuccessful or distressing, thought processes that again take us away from a present situation that may be completely different. To develop mindfulness we need to learn to focus our attention through our senses and to take notice of what we are experiencing. This can be developed using relaxation and visualisation, both of which I can help you achieve using hypnotherapy techniques.
