The importance of forming effective boundaries in helping us protect ourselves against hurt and abuse
Tag: therapy
Recovering your self in 7 days
Hollowday There’s a hollow in me; an absence. Like a piece of furniture missing from a room I haven’t been in for years. I enter knowing something’s changed and I can’t say what. There’s just the feeling. Hollow. Dumbday I feel dirty on the inside. I scrub the outside; wet hair, towel and soap, and…
On choosing a psychotherapist
When choosing the right psychotherapist it’s important to remember some basic facts about psychotherapy if you want it to work for you: Psychotherapy is founded upon a trustworthy, secure relationship. The best evidence from the longest-term study supporting psychotherapy’s effectiveness in helping people make changes in their lives says that the quality of the therapeutic…
Protected: Depression Part 4: downhill or uphill?
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Protected: Depression Part 3: ‘bad’ feelings, alcohol and substance misuse
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Protected: Depression Part 2: a well-worn path
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Protected: The Outsider Part 2: living off-label
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CBT: a low-cost ‘cure’ for psychiatric ‘Illness’?
“The fact remains that the construct of psychiatric diagnosis and the construct of a psychological model aligning itself to it are both divorced from the actual, more complex and individuated realities of the particular patient and the individual practitioner. The technocratic relationship of the first denies the non-mechanistic, much more complex organic nature of the…
Healing Minds: what works for you?
Often we are so socialised into looking to ‘professionals’ for their expertise that we forget that, prior to the boom in professions, we did a pretty good job of taking care of ourselves and one another. Family, neighbours, community, aunts and uncles, grandparents: all of these community bonds have been eroded by massive shifts in…
Change Your World: Self-healing and Loving Kindness
“What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?” ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau My strong personal belief is that it is in human nature to take care of other living things as a feature of our conscience. Sadly, many people are out of touch with this facility in themselves. I think if our culture retained the…
Existential Analysis: how I work with you
A brief overview of Existential Analysis and Psychotherapy
The Outsider Part 1: clarifying our place in society
If there’s one area of my work that I have a special interest in it’s working with people who feel like they don’t fit in or who find themselves rejected by the group. I wanted to start writing a series of posts on this subject because of the confusion and assumptions that we typically make…
Self-healing: a shift from pain to compassion in five minutes
Periods of mental distress are often characterised by a hyper-focus on our own struggles to the exclusion of everything else. In the midst of pain and suffering, loneliness and desperation we can end up so concentrated on the distressing aspects of our lives and on what is missing that we literally forget ourselves and what’s…
Existential Analysis, Integrative Psychotherapy and Other Approaches to Helping
This is a somewhat contentious area for many practitioners because, as with most fields of endeavour, everyone has their own territorial imperatives and personal definitions. The terms counsellor, therapist and psychotherapist are, for example, often used interchangeably but do not necessarily express the same activities. So with that disclaimer, here is my simple outline of…
Mental distress: a sane response to an insane world
Is there something wrong with me? Or am I responding sanely to something wrong with the world?
Fees and Payment Alternatives
The normal means of paying for therapy sessions has traditionally been payment in cash at the end of each session. This is my standard payment method as it is straighforward and time-efficient. For this reason I don’t accept cheques or credit cards. However, times are changing, and as more people recognise that the central banking…
Protected: A Guide to Making the Most of your Sessions
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