What is psychotherapy?

Psychotherapy is a challenging and rewarding personal journey towards increased self-awareness, acceptance and peace.

It offers you a chance to talk and work through feelings and situations. You can bring specific issues such as relationships, dilemmas, doubts, commitment issues, existential questions (Who am I? What am I doing? What's the purpose of my life?) or a simple curiosity to know yourself more.

It involves taking time and space to slow down and explore, with honesty and courage, who you are, as yourself and in the world with others.

It allows you to grow in awareness and grace, to move away from habitual thoughts, movements, responses and feelings. It teaches you to listen to the natural intelligence of your heart and your body. As you let go of past patterns, new perspectives, meanings and directions emerge, giving you greater freedom to create novel opportunities, and to choose your own life's journey. Although potentially painful, therapy moves you towards a more harmonious sense of wholeness, liberation and joy. It is a truly amazing process!

The process of psychotherapy

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run, than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. - Helen Keller

Therapy does not necessarily focus on the past, but on how you re-enact aspects of your past today. Learning to be fully present in the moment, you explore your inner processes, attending to your emotions, feelings, bodily sensations... so that you develop an increasing self awareness.

This awareness develops into a wisdom that allows you more compassion and acceptance of who you are, including your limitations and weaknesses. It teaches you to integrate aspects of yourself which might be difficult to accept, so that you can manage your instincts without repressing them or being overwhelmed by them. It facilitates you in developing your inner resources to disentangle yourself from engulfing feelings and fears. This process deepens while therapy progresses.

The aim is not to forcefully alter experiences, but to understand how you relate to them and who you are in their midst. Yet, inevitably, through self awareness and the capacity for self-fulfilment, you become more honest, spontaneous, and flexible, and you begin to change

My beliefs about psychotherapy

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not? - Robert F. Kennedy

Through therapy you can explore how the present is shaped by past conditioning. Useful and appropriate defences might have been set up in the past to respond to real situations, crises, traumas. As a child, you really did the best you could to ‘survive' the reality around you. And you did survive.

But with time, these strategies developed into habitual and fixed patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, which are now damaging your true self, free will and creativity. When you identify with and hold on to a false self, suffering often ensues because you feel inherently dissatisfied, alienated, inauthentic or empty. You restrict your way of living, keeping yourself stuck and unhappy.

Self awareness developed through therapy is the tool to understand yourself and why you are the person you are. Whatever you do - how you move, eat, talk, what books you read, who your friends are, what your home looks like - says something about who you have become. When you learn to listen to yourself more accurately and to see yourself more clearly, you start taking wiser decisions.

Why therapy needs a therapist

The real act of discovery is not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes. - Marcel Proust

Psychotherapy happens in the relationship between client and therapist. It is the purposeful and meaningful use of such a relationship to engender change. Together, we collaborate to build respect, responsibility and trust. Sometimes we use our experience in the room to explore how it can be a mirror of the outside world.

As a therapist, I offer you an open, supportive and enabling safe environment for your self-exploration. I assist you while you re-discover your own inner capacity for health, growth, creativity, peace and well-being.

The sessions are completely non-judgemental and confidential.

How I do therapy

You must be the change you wish to see in the world. - Mahatma Gandhi

I have a holistic approach. I am trained in integrative psychotherapy which promotes openness to and merging of different schools of thought (CBT, Transpersonal, Existentialist, Gestalt, Person-Centred, Analytical, etc.)

I don't have a method which I impose. Instead, I allow each client to guide me towards the creation of an individual process, unique to their needs.

I tend to work in the present, attending to what emerges in the relationship with openness and care.

How long therapy will last

Sessions are once weekly, and we will begin with a commitment of three months. Then we will discuss your particular wishes and needs.

The overall number of sessions will very likely depend on an almost endless number of factors: the nature of the difficulties you wish to explore, the speed at which you want to work, how long it takes you to trust us, whether you want to deepen your self-awareness once a matter at hand has been addressed, etc.

Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out. - John Woodman

How do I know whether therapy or life coaching is best for me?

If you want to address a particular issue which is mostly practical (career, housing, life planning, etc) then coaching might be best.

If you feel a general sense of dissatisfaction or unhappiness, or if you are aware that things are just not working in your life maybe in your relationships, then therapy might be more helpful.

I'm happy to discuss this with you to find what would be more appropriate.

How do I know if you are the right person for me?

You don't. Yet. Only by meeting, and by working together, you can get a sense of whether I can be right for you: if you can feel at ease, trust me, allow me in... I have tried to give you a flavour of who I am, my ethics, my beliefs, my style, etc in these few pages, but only a real encounter could tell us both if things could work between us.