Psychotherapy Services
Firstly, for our purposes, the terms counsellor and psychotherapist are interchangeable. Indeed, my governing body, the BACP states that “Counselling and psychotherapy are umbrella terms that cover a range of talking therapies. They are delivered by trained practitioners who work with people over a short or long term to help them bring about effective change and/or enhance their wellbeing”.
Forget the blank screen, silent approach beloved of so many TV series, in which it often transpires that the therapist has fallen asleep. Discard too, the directive approach – convincing you that if only you’d think ‘correctly’, then all would magically be well. Carl Rogers, founder of the humanistic approach to therapy, put it nicely:
“In my early professional years, I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way:
How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
There’s the crux. You’ve a problem/issue, and you don’t know what to do about it. Together, though, we can make real progress, not through a teacher:pupil dynamic, but via an authentic sense of humans meeting and creating change. We’ll look at defences and blockages that arise both ‘out there’ in your life, and ‘in the room’ between us, we’ll look at family history, we’ll see how it might be impacting on your life now, we’ll delve and explore and work out in a relaxed state that’s truly conducive to genuine change what you need to ‘bring about effective change and/or enhance your wellbeing’.
The Therapeutic Relationship
Among the issues that I’ve become experienced in dealing with over the last 22 years, are addiction, self-harm and eating disorders, anxiety, depression and trauma, health related issues, bereavement, identity, culture and spirituality, relationships, family and children, stress and work, sex and sexuality and ADHD.
Those are the ‘things’, the ‘issues’, but it may well be that what seems to be the ‘presenting issue’ turns out to be a symptom rather than the root cause of your distress, and our work may then shift accordingly. By this, I mean that symptoms might be said to have a protective purpose, or rather to have had a protective purpose when they first took root.
Depression, for example, might be regarded in part as a response to feelings of anger towards others. If it didn’t feel safe to express that anger towards others – maybe our primary caregivers couldn’t tolerate our natural anger as infants – then it may have been better to turn that anger inwards, onto the self. In this sense, symptoms might be viewed as necessary childhood survival strategies which have subsequently become adult neuroses. We could think of some of these tendencies as being a bit like Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese Army intelligence officer who was stationed in the Philippines during the second world war. He was in hiding in the mountains when the war ended, and consequently didn’t hear the announcement. As a result, he remained ready for combat, and indeed killed several people, until 1974 when he was finally found. That kind of hypervigilance, once vital for survival but now unnecessary, can be a common trait.
The Initial Issues
‘Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.’ - EM Forster, Howards End (1910)
EM Forster’s oft-quoted lines are usually regarded simply as a plea for connectedness between nations and classes; the remainder of the century that followed the book’s publication demonstrates the hell that can ensue when that doesn’t happen, when whole countries and races become ‘other’.
Intra-connectedness
It wasn’t just a call for inter-connectedness, though. Intra-connectedness, that’s to say bringing together the sometimes conflicting aspects of oneself, was fast becoming the focus of Sigmund Freud and those who followed him’s work. It boiled down to this: if we ignore/deny aspects of ourselves that we’re ashamed of, then they won’t simply disappear, but rather will come back in some different, potentially inflated, form.
The return of the repressed, Freud called it. It might be disowned and projected onto others: we often accuse other people of the ‘crimes’ we’re all too prone to committing ourselves. The Navajo Indians used to say that when you point an accusing finger at someone, there are three pointing straight back at you. If we don’t project the disowned outwards, then we might take it out on ourselves: depression could be said to be anger turned inwards, with parts of ourselves in conflict.
What causes addictions?
Addictions, be they in the form of alcohol, drugs, exercise, internet use or whatever else, might be seen as attempts to numb and sedate parts of us that we’re not alright with.
So, if we could only just connect within ourselves and with others, all would be well. The trouble is, the imprints that many of us experience in our early years – what we witness between our parents and what goes on between our parents/caregivers and us – don’t always come from a place of stable, secure attachment. If our primary caregivers have real difficulty in tolerating us when we’re kicking off and having tantrums, for example, then in order to get our needs met (to stay alive, basically), to become acceptable, we may well have to repress aspects of ourselves and foreground the parts that seem to get us what we require.
Connection and anxiety:
Connecting to people, a fundamental human need, can thus become an anxiety inducing experience. We may become disconnected from parts of ourselves, and therefore unable to fully connect with others. Life goes on, and we become grown up, but we keep doing the same attachment dance. It may be the one in which we quickly get close to others and then rapidly retreat, or maybe it’s the one where we keep a distance and then become distraught when the other person gives up on us because of our apparent lack of interest.
Connectedness
What therapy can do, is provide the safe container in which your various ‘self-parts’ can be heard and accepted. The connection between us will obviously be affected by whatever attachment dance has become habitual, but we’ll address this, we’ll work with it, and via the therapeutic connection, your internal connectedness will develop, that sense of self-acceptance which may have been curtailed in earlier life. Amidst all this, we’ll work with your relationship with your central nervous system, which, we might say is the most important relationship you have. In brief, this means helping you shift from either too much sympathetic nervous system reactivity (which translates as fight-flight-freeze being your default position) or too much dorsal vagal response (where a deadened, immobilised flatness is habitual). We do this via breathwork, hypnotherapy, and relaxation development, all of which you’ll learn and take away with you as practices for life. You might think of this as regulating the hardware, so that the software – the thinking, the imagining, the decision making – can run smoothly.
Therapy and Change - How it Works
And even though you’ve come along to therapy wanting to change, there may well be some resistance, because, as the saying goes, most people will choose a familiar misery over a foreign happiness. We can so easily hang on in there with abusive relationships with others and with parts of ourselves. Our work isn’t about attempting to erase aspects of you that you don’t like. That’s a non-starter, a self-punishment that would then sit alongside the other harsh impositions you may have had to swallow over the years. Another thing we won’t do is to simply wade in and apply rationality to what’s going on for you, to those behaviours that keep cropping up both in yourself and perhaps in those you’re in close relationships with.
What Therapy Can Do
My Approach
Working Compassionately with You
In all likelihood you know full well that whatever you’re doing isn’t serving you well, isn’t ‘good for you’, or, rather, your adult self knows all of that. It may be a younger aspect of you, though, from a far less logical/rational place, that we really need to connect with, and that logical voice it hears may well have a shaming effect, actually making things worse.
So instead, we’ll work compassionately with all parts, all aspects, respecting the roles they’ve had to play. Our starting point of compassion is that as humans we’ve inherited a brain that’s hundreds of millennia old and that can have difficulty dealing with the modern world with its unique stressors. We’ll work with your history, with your present life, and with the immediate present experience of us being in the room together. That last part is crucial, the process of being present rather than simply rooted in a story that we’ve told ourselves and have been told by others. Of course we’ll talk about concepts, but the here-and-now alliance will always be central.
Breaking Free
We live in a culture obsessed with diagnoses, disorders and definitions, and sometimes these can be useful – I recall, for example, the relief of a middle aged client when he realised that all his life he’d been struggling with Attention deficit hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) – but they can also cloud the specific human experience. The poet Robert Frost said ‘I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.’ What I think he’s getting at, this idea that some of the unique, beautiful qualities of a poem can be erased if it’s ‘translated’ and turned into a piece of straightforward journalese or a repetitive patterned lyric, is paralleled when we turn a specific person’s specific experience into something generalised. Or, as the lead character in the cult 1960s TV series The Prisoner, dubbed Number 6 by his captors, forcefully exclaimed: ‘I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or Numbered. I am not a Number, I am a free man!’ Put another way, we need to be wary of too much dominance of the brain’s left hemisphere, which catalogues, makes lists and inventories and doesn’t allow for the nuance, creativity and imagination of the right hemisphere.
The Finger and the Moon
Bruce Lee beautifully summed up the trap of being too preoccupied with theories rather than what’s actually being experienced, at the start of ‘Enter The Dragon’:‘ Don’t think! Feel. It is like a finger pointing a way to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.’
Those who’ve seen Enter The Dragon, a film that it’s safe to say is rarely mentioned on psychotherapy websites, will be aware of the importance of being embodied, that’s to say present in one’s body rather than being too preoccupied with this apparently separate thing, the mind. For many therapists, the approach of ‘top down’ still persists: in other words thinking our way (from the head/brain/mind down) to improved wellbeing.
Polyvagal Theory, Hypnotherapy, and Energy Work
What we’ll also check into is a ‘bottom up’ approach, which means using our physical experience to affect our wellbeing rather than the top down approach of ‘thinking our way to being better’. In recent years this area has seen huge developments, from the cold water immersion approach of Wim Hof, to Polyvagal Theory which directly works with the nervous system. We might do this via various exercises, involving breathwork and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT, better known as ‘Tapping’), or Hypnotherapy, all of which help us shift from a state of panic or deadness in our central nervous systems to a safer state that lends itself more to social engagement and a deeper ability to learn and change.
Therapy Fees
For therapy sessions, I charge between £60 and £75 depending on ability to pay, and I'm also registered to work with clients with AXA and Aviva health insurance
Location
I work online and at several clinics in Brighton and Hove, and though it's preferable to have sessions at the same time and place each week, I appreciate that some people's work schedules don't allow for this, and so some flexibility is possible.
Find out more about locations