I have 27 years clinical experience in assessing patient needs in NHS primary and tertiary care and private practice, where I learned to quickly and accurately assess serious, enduring and complex presentations, in order to direct patients to the most appropriate form of help for meeting their particular needs. In an average of four sessions in my practice, assessment of your needs will provide you with detailed insight into the historical roots of your problems (individuals and couples), how you are maintaining them, and whether or not my practice can help you resolve them. If it can, you will also be given an outline of specific therapeutic tasks that will allow you to make the changes you want from therapy. If I think another service or approach would better match your needs, symptoms or personality, I will usually be able to tell you this in the first meeting, and will share this with you to save you time and money. My aim is to speak plainly and only work with you if your needs can be best served by my practice.

Accurate assessment also helps you avoid the common pitfall of paying for weeks and months of sessions of therapy in which you talk through your problems repeatedly, with no clear feedback, guidance, or direction from a therapist. Or where you have chosen a technique-based therapy like EMDR or CBT that may be too restrictive for you. Many patients who come to me commonly relay stories of months or years using commonly promoted approaches that have barely scratched the surface of their symptoms, much less addressed the underlying causes. The time, effort and money wasted in taking the wrong directions in therapy is all completely unnecessary when you can receive a good assessment at the start of your journey.

*Cognitive, behavioural and trauma interventions are available in this practice.

Counselling and symptom-management approaches are available in this practice, and can provide relief from anxiety, stress, worry, depression, loss, bereavement, distress and confusion when you are troubled. You can quickly understand your problems and begin to create more effective ways of coping within a fairly short period of time.

You also have the option of specifically tailored meditation and yoga tuition for additional relief from over-thinking, addictive impulses, anxiety, insecurity, panic attacks, and other difficult emotional states, subject to assessment of your core needs, presentation, and history.

If you pursue depth psychotherapy after assessment, this focusses on resolving the root causes of your struggles, including more serious or enduring problems that you may have tried to solve by therapies that did not work for you, or by going to the gym, keeping busy, or escapism, comfort eating etc. Deeper work offers you the opportunity to resolve long-standing issues, emotional pain and mental suffering; to overcome ingrained habits, over-thinking, and unsatisfying ways of relating to others. To make new lifestyle changes that are actually good for you and your relationships. And to create more authentic, honest ways of experiencing and living your life.

Depth psychotherapy is:

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

• somatic: concerned with 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: geared to understanding what you can do to support and heal your nervous system

• experiential: tailored to help you experience your life with more depth instead of turning everything into over-thinking

• 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.

• existential: formed around the big perspective of your life in the context of personal meaning, mortality and the time you have left on Earth, the unique value of your own experience, self-reliant empowerment, and walking your own path independent of other people telling you how you should be

• human: unlike the trend in using phone apps, A.I. advice, youtube videos, and technology to help people temporarily calm and reassure themselves, psychotherapy in this practice is about human relationship and its power to heal us through genuine human contact and understanding, sharing personal truth, through empathic connection, intuitive wisdom, vulnerability, and the development of emotional and spiritual intelligence to deepen our appreciation of life.

Combined with somatic approaches like yoga and meditation, dietary changes, improved sleep hygiene, psychotherapy in this practice offers a unique, holistic way of working that treats you as a whole person with a history, lifestyle, context, values, views, and aspirations, rather than a collection of unwanted experiences that many of us may try to medicate and numb out of awareness. Psychotherapy 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

• emotional intelligence development and somatic experiencing to help you feel more at home in your own body

• 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 the effects of trauma and 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 political and spiritual contexts that profoundly influence our direction and mindset

If you want more than symptom relief and techniques to tide you over, psychotherapy in this practice is a path for re-humanising yourself in a world that is being rapidly and deliberately de-humanised. Human life can be an experience for growing your consciousness into greater sanity, love, power, and wisdom, so that you can live well emotionally, mentally, physically, morally, and in line with your nature. In this sense, Existential Analysis is for individuals who want to re-learn how to be more human, more themselves, and who may be fed up trying to squeeze themselves into a mould dictated by society.

Working at deeper levels of your psyche can allow you to realise that ‘symptoms and diagnoses’ are merely surface ways of labelling human nature. They are not who you are. Nor are they defects of your character. Depth psychotherapy aims at building self-reliant mental health and wellbeing by learning to understand, accept, and see the value in the being that you are. And thus what your mind, body, emotions, and conscience are actually saying to you through your symptoms; not in words, but in feelings, intuitions, tensions, habits, avoidances, dreams, and thoughts.

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced." ~ Søren Kierkegaard

We live in an era where there seems to be no such thing as ‘normal’ any more. Where the value of being human is being rapidly eroded by routine dependencies on frivolities, social media pretentiousness, escapism, technology, consumerism, division between people, mindless obedience and conformity, and uncritical acceptance of the powers that be, for example. Many of the things we were told would make our lives easier, have in fact made them harder and shallower. And less human and intimate in many ways. Real, human connection and individual mental stability are suffering as a result. With mental disorders doubling since 1990 (ref)

Ask yourself whether you are fully valuing, respecting, understanding, appreciating, and caring for yourself as a person right now. Ask how authentic your relationships are and whether you are truly happy in them. Ask whether or not you feel free and secure in life, and whether you are focussing on what truly, deeply matters to you. If not, then it is possible to find ways to live in a state of greater awareness, skill, conscience, responsibility, fearlessness, self-reliance; with perspective and appreciation of the life that you are, so that you can find greater peace with your Self.

It is possible to quickly get to the core of what you struggle with, and to resolve it wherever humanly possible. 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 straightforward work you need to do to form a new, more self-reliant, self-respecting path of wellbeing for yourself. This is true whether you have a diagnosis or not.

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