Psychotherapy
You don’t need to know what is troubling you before we meet. If you knew, you might not need to come.
Psychotherapy, as I practise it, is a conversation, at the same time each week, about your life as you actually live it. It doesn’t sound like much. That, I think, is part of why it works.
What you can talk about
Anything. Thoughts, feelings, relationships, memories, dreams, and the things that don’t seem worth mentioning, which often turn out to be the point.
People come with anxiety or low mood, burnout, addiction and compulsive habits, difficulties with eating, the after-effects of trauma, or trouble in a relationship or a family. Others come without a name for what is wrong, and are sometimes worried that this disqualifies them. It doesn’t.
What happens
My approach is existential-phenomenological and psychoanalytic. In practice I listen, ask questions, and try not to know too quickly what you mean.
You are invited to say whatever comes to mind, without sorting it first. This is harder than it sounds, because we are all rather good at editing. Silence, hesitation and not knowing what to say are not failures of the method; they are the method. And what happens between the two of us tends to show how you are with other people, with the advantage that here we can talk about it.
I don’t promise a cure. People don’t, I think, come to be cured so much as to find out what else they might want.
A first meeting
Nothing has to be said before you are ready to say it. A first meeting is for both of us to consider whether talking to me is likely to be of use to you; it is not a commitment.
It lasts fifty minutes and takes place online. Afterwards you decide, in your own time, whether to go on.
If you would like to know more