existential-analysis.com* is a psychotherapy practice located in Glasgow, UK offering over 27 years of clinical experience (NHS and private practice) to help patients address the full spectrum of simple to complex mental, emotional, relationship, psychiatric, and existential problems.

☞ Individuals, couples and groups can receive skilled, experienced, professional help and support in-person, or online via high-quality video conferencing wherever you live in the world.

*former domain name therapyglasgow.com

Short-term counselling and symptom-management approaches are available in this practice, and can provide relief from anxiety, stress, worry, distress and confusion when you are struggling.

Specifically tailored meditation and yoga tuition is also available for relief from over-thinking, addictive impulses, anxiety and other difficult emotions, subject to assessment of your needs.

If you want more than symptom relief, psychotherapy in this practice involves working at deeper levels of your psyche, which can help you become more authentic, secure, confident, clear in your purpose, and honest with yourself. You can easily identify and understand the original causes of your struggles, and resolve them emotionally and energetically.

The seeds of our suffering often lie forgotten in our early social conditioning, routine mistreatment, the false beliefs we form about ourselves and the world, and in our fears and traumas from as early as infancy. These origins emerge later in adulthood as deep and enduring insecurities, physical tensions and difficult feelings in the body, problematic behaviours like addictions and procrastination; internal mental conflicts, self-loathing and guilt, struggles with mood and depression, stress, phobias and addictions, relationship friction, and other types of inner suffering that can adversely impact our mental and physical health.

Medium- and longer-term depth psychotherapy is focussed on identifying and resolving the root causes of enduring problems, which offers you the opportunity to resolve long-standing issues; to form new habits, and more authentic ways of experiencing and living your life.

Depth psychotherapy is:

• analytical: focussed on helping you to clarify and deepen your understanding of yourself

• somatic: focussed on your relationship to your body and what you are doing with your emotions

• trauma-informed: focussed on resolving unfinished business from your past that causes you pain or hardship in the present

• neurology-informed: focussed on understanding what you can do to support and heal your nervous system

• experiential: focussed on experiencing your life instead of turning everything into thoughts and words

• holistic: Existential Analysis and Integrative Psychotherapy encompass the childhood, family, workplace, social, political, economic, lifestyle, environmental, physiological, and spiritual contexts that produce our emotional and mental disturbance and suffering.

Combining Existential Analysis and Integrative Psychotherapy with somatic approaches like yoga and meditation, psychotherapy in this practice offers a unique, multi-faceted way of working that treats you as a whole person with a history, lifestyle, context, values, and aspirations, rather than a collection of symptoms to be eliminated. This can include additional supports as standard, such as:

• detailed assessment at the start of our work, with a list of therapeutic tasks core to your needs and hopes for change

• tailored one-to-one yoga tuition: for helping you exist more in your body and less in your thoughts

• various forms of meditation and guided awareness practices: to help you build skills in controlling your mind instead of letting your mind control you

• art therapy: for individuals who find it easier to access emotions and experiences through images, music, movement etc

• specific protocols designed by this practice: for helping patients recover and heal their nervous systems and resolve conflicts within their psyche

• extensive resources: articles, courses, guided meditation audio, and optional support between sessions when required

• socio-cultural and spiritual: we live embedded in contexts that profoundly influence our direction and mindset, whether we believe in them or not

Existential Analysis is a non-pathologising approach to psychotherapy. Meaning that, whilst we can use psychiatric and medical terms to describe aspects of our habits, ways of relating, and mental states, each of us is ultimately expressing some aspect of human nature. Rather than judging and reducing yourself to a stigmatising and limiting diagnosis, a more useful question is whether or not you are defeating yourself or adversely affecting others in the process. And if so, how we can find ways to help you live in a state of greater awareness, skill, conscience, responsibility, and peace with yourself.

Whether or not you see yourself through the lens of a psychiatric or psychological term - like ADHD, or narcissism, depression, phobia, alexithymia, personality disorder, mood disorder, bulimia/ anorexia nervosa, body dysmorphia, addiction, or whatever your label - our task in psychotherapy is to speak in plain terms about what you are experiencing and doing; and what helps or hinders you. And what alternatives and different paths you could take to either adjust, adapt, or overcome your problems. Having extensive experience in working with severe and enduring conditions given psychiatric labels, including those considered by some as ‘untreatable’ such as narcissism (which is now a cultural ‘pandemic’), it becomes possible to get to the core of what you struggle with, and to re-humanise it as something purposeful and entirely solvable. All you need (and this is no small thing) is the courage and conscience to face yourself, so that you can deepen your understanding of how and why you are as you are. And then to do the work you need to do to form a new, more self-reliant, self-respecting path for yourself. This is true whether you have a diagnosis or not.

See the SERVICES page for more details on specific problems patients bring to, and resolve, in therapy.