I work from an integrative approach to counselling and psychotherapy. This means I integrate various counselling/psychotherapy approaches according to client need.
In my work there are certain modes of working and domains of exploration which are important. The following expresses some of these:
Faith in the client’s expertise, ability to self-regulate and to change: I approach therapeutic work as a facilitator of change whereby I help to create a certain environment, a certain relationship and utilize my skills in a way which empowers the client to create the changes they want in their life. I understand the client as having untapped resources of wisdom and clarity about what they would like out of life and how to regulate themselves in attaining this. My role is not to impose what I feel the client needs but to cultivate a certain space where the client accesses their own needs, power, self-regulation and ability to change and for them to create this change in their own way and at their own pace.
The client/therapist relationship: Many of the problems we experience in life are linked to relations to people and our challenges in having satisfying relationships. Often this is related to the dynamics of our relationships to our early attachment figures. Working through and healing many of our concerns often involves doing so in relationship. I attempt to provide an empathic, non-judgmental and authentic relationship with the client which allows for a safe exploration of the client-therapist relationship as a way to explore early attachment deficits. This way of practicing is based on the notion that the client-therapist relationship mirrors how the client relates to others. This exploration can be the key to therapeutic growth.
Emotion focus: I believe that therapeutic growth is helped through counselling that is grounded in an awareness of the emotions underlying our thoughts, (cognitions), and our behaviours. Accessing and working with emotions, rather than solely trying to change thoughts, allows a greater spectrum of the client’s life to be engaged in the change process. The psychotherapist Leslie Greenberg states that ‘you cant move on until you have arrived’. Often we carry wounds which have not been processed and are still having an impact on our lives. In order for us to move on we need to arrive at these wounds, feel them, process and make meaning out of them before we can let them go. My work as a therapist involves creating a safe and holding environment within the therapeutic relationship where whatever needs to arise and move on does so.
Mindfulness: Mindfulness is a word that arises out of the meditation traditions of the east. The theory behind mindfulness is that it is our attachment to emotions/ thoughts that create un-necessary suffering in our lives. Becoming mindful and less attached is a key to increasing freedom and peace in our lives. Mindfulness is used in western counselling/psychotherapy in two, general, ways: (i) as a strategy for clients to learn and practice outside of therapy, (ii) as a climate to be cultivated within the therapeutic encounter. In my work a key to letting go of old unsatisfactory ways of being involves ‘sitting with’ one’s experience, including one’s wounds, without reacting or becoming self-judgmental, and learning to accept oneself and one’s experience as it is. This mindful acceptance, paradoxically, allows for the creation of therapeutic movement and is often the basis for growth and the changing unproductive habits.
Body awareness and somatic orientation: The current psychotherapeutic world, especially the field of trauma studies, is strongly influenced by neuro-biological and brain-cognitive studies which are problematizing the idea that the mind and the body are separate. What is arising out of these studies is that we, humans, ‘are/have’ an ‘embodied mind’ or a ‘mindful body’ and that thoughts and emotions inhere in our bodies in various ways. These studies, and the schools of body-oriented psychotherapy, such as Somatic Trauma Therapy, claim that attention to body processes and increasing awareness of our experience of our body is vital in accessing not only our wounds but our potential. In my work mindful exploration of body-awareness can be an important and powerful way to free constrictions and stuck areas in one’s life. As there is a relationship between the mind and the body working through the body allows emotional and cognitive change to arise thus creating space for novel change in one’s actions in the world
Cultivating self-support: More often than not we are divorced from our own needs. Cultivating self-support involves being in touch with one’s needs and finding ways to support oneself in having these needs met. This may be through learning how to relax wherever you are in order to better manage day to day stress, creating the support for yourself that allows you to ask your partner/family/friends for what you need without feeling ashamed, learning to walk away from a situation when you know it is nurturing to you, learning to support yourself through healthy habits and not through destructive addictions and so on. Counselling and psychotherapy involves the internalization of the ability to self-support and a safe space where this self-support can be practiced. I find that engaging the client in a on-going conversation around what they feel they need in life and how they can have this need met is powerful and healing work.
Socially aware cognitive re-structuring: All counselling and psychotherapy involves cognitive re-structuring; changing how we see the world is correlated with psychological change. In this process I attempt to be aware of the ethical, social, ecological and political dimensions of the types of thoughts and linguistic structures client’s may be internalizing. Language has power and how we articulate the world has ethical, social, ecological and political consequences: the worldview we internalize becomes the world we live in. In my work with clients I find it important to raise awareness around such issues while engaging in conversations around socially aware and compassion based narratives.
Homework and experimentation: Much growth occurs in counselling ‘simply’ through the therapeutic relationship, talking and working things out during the session. Yet, experimenting with new ways of feeling, thinking and acting during the therapy session and outside it can only increase awareness around one’s patterns of being, possible novels ways of experience and help one to internalize one’s growth. I find it useful to negotiate with clients experiments during sessions in order to raise awareness around patterns of being and also to negotiate various forms of homework; creative tasks and experiments to be engaged in as a way to empower the client in their own self-exploration and growth.
Systemic/field focus: As much as we try to become independent we are, on many levels, inter-dependent with others. We exist and live within systems and fields of relationships such as families, peer-groups, work environments, organizations and political systems. Often clients come to counselling thinking/feeling that they are the carriers of all their problems and it is all their fault. Frequently it is the systems and relationships we find ourselves in which have problematic dynamics which create suffering in our lives. In my work I find it important to assess the systems in which people find themselves in and often the work involves raising awareness about and creating change within the systems people exist in. Often this involves empowering clients with a political orientation to their life-world.
Exploring, affirming and celebrating strengths, successes, connections, joys: Lastly, it is important to deconstruct counselling and psychotherapy as being solely about pain and suffering. Therapy can be and is so many things. Processes of change involve facing ‘unfinished business’, (old pain), facing truths about how one is that are difficult to digest, learning to act in the world in a way which is new, learning to let go old and dear habits which are no longer useful and so on. These processes can be challenging. Yet, a big part of this process is accessing vital, healthy and empowering resources that lie within one. Finding oneself thinking, feeling and relating to others in healthier ways is a joyful experience. At the heart of my work is a strong focus on therapy not as bunch of techniques to fix broken people but as a growth process which, in most cases, is a fundamentally positive experience.