Now that you have an overview of this practice, you can also consider the process of psychotherapy in more detail so that you can make the best choice for yourself.

Through feeling lost, scared, or desperate, increasing numbers of people are relying on Google, ChatGPT, youtube, and social media to self-diagnose their suffering, and get advice on what treatment A.I. tells them is ‘the best’, for a self-diagnosis that may actually be wrong. Many are wasting their time and money on treatments that are not appropriate for their particular presentations because they are failing to see or understand the real causes of their problems. The recent boom in people seeking ADHD and ASD diagnoses and medication is an example. With little understanding of psychotherapy and how the psyche works, and grasping at a psychiatric diagnosis that seems to fit, it can be tempting to choose medical-sounding ‘alphabet therapies’ (those abbreviated into three or four letters) that seem popular, in the belief that these are the best way to feel better. When the reality is they may be too restrictive and narrowly focussed on techniques that have been derived from broader, deeper approaches to psychotherapy. Technique-driven therapies also often invite patients to think of themselves as if the psyche, mind and body are like a machine to be adjusted by an expert using a mysterious technical procedure. This is a bit like taking a specific vitamin, when what may actually be needed for improved health is a lifestyle change including daily exercise, good sleep, a less stressful career, and an organic diet comprised of nutrient-dense foods.

Alternatively, patients may seek something broad like person-centred counselling only to feel frustrated at the absence of feedback, guidance, focus, or direction. Some try the magic pill approach via medication that suppresses their feelings and thoughts, only to feel mentally dulled, emotionally numb and lifeless. Each approach can have its merits and downsides, depending upon who you are, the practitioner’s experience and skill level, and what you need and are able to work with.

To add to the confusion, there are now growing numbers of therapies with weird and wonderful names, and people offering therapies and counselling, with widely varying levels of training, skills, and experience. It’s important to know what type of help you actually need, and the level of practitioner competence and experience required to address your therapeutic aims. Broadly speaking, here are some categories of help you might encounter:

Counselling: gentle supportive listening and very mild challenge. Good for helping you reflect, deal with loss, and gently rebuild self-esteem.

Psychology: a very broad range of activities that do not have a central consensus, but are ways of trying to understand the mind and behaviour by using experiments, theoretical models and statistics to draw conclusions about the average person. Some psychologists work with patients (counselling psychologists and clinical psychologists, for example). Others help advertising companies market goods and services.

Psychiatry: a branch of medicine that attempts to categorise socially unusual aspects of human nature into medical diagnoses. Treatment is often by prescribed psychoactive medication to suppress or alleviate symptoms. But ECT, psycho-surgery, detention and restraint are still in use today. Some psychiatrists do additional training as psychotherapists.

Symptom-Management: All psychotherapies do this to some degree. The broad range of ‘alphabet therapies’ that derived their techniques from psychotherapies and other fields generally focus on one or two aspects of the psyche and specific symptoms. EMDR and CBT are examples. Heavily promoted by insurance companies and government agencies, the public now tends to believe that these technique-based approaches are ‘the best’ or ‘the only’ ways of treating specific diagnoses, when this is simply not the case.

Psychotherapy: A broad range of approaches that vary in their remit and often have a counselling element to their delivery. Some are more interactive than others, and may work quite deeply on resolving causes. Others can look and feel indistinguishable from person-centred counselling.

Analysis: Depth psychotherapy that seeks to identify and resolve the original causes of your problems by understanding the deeper influences within the psyche, your history, relationships and degree of honesty with yourself. Examples are Psychoanalysis, Existential Analysis, Jungian Analysis, which are very different from one another, but may share some similarities, depending upon the practitioner.

Online Presence and Fake Reviews

As our culture grows increasingly inauthentic, looking for a reliable service becomes more difficult. My inbox is inundated daily by people selling fake review services and ‘reputation management services’, which is one of the reasons I’m no longer able to reply to email queries, as many emails that appear to be from new patients turn out to be from advertising companies, for example. Patients must be aware of the unscrupulous nature of some practitioners in the helping professions and elsewhere, who perhaps being desperate for business and a need to appear special, resort to using fake reviews to boost their position in search results. My practice only publishes genuine reviews by patients who have actually worked with me.

Here is one of a dozen emails I received just today from another company selling fake review services to counsellors, psychologists, and psychotherapists and others:

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Your 5-star rating is already powerful—now let’s support it with the review volume that truly convinces customers.
Send me your WhatsApp or Telegram, and let’s get started.

++++++++++++++

If authenticity is important to you, be on the lookout for unusually high review numbers and reviews that don’t sound genuine. Again, I’ve found accredited/ BPS registered psychologists around Glasgow using cut-and-pated copies of my genuine reviews, on Yell.com for example!

Accreditation/ registration

Psychotherapy in the UK is not regulated, but a counsellor or psychotherapist can voluntarily join a private management organisation, pay them a fee each year, and have their contact details put on their registers. This is ‘accreditation’ or ‘registration’. Currently, I choose not to be managed by a private company whilst it remains voluntary. Registration or accreditation does not guarantee practitioner conscience or competence in my opinion. However, if you need the added security of seeing a therapist who is overseen by a management company, then you might want to seek out a practitioner who is registered with one. There are no shortage of practitioners in this category for you to choose from.

Assessment

Consideration of your particular history, needs, expectations, values, lifestyle, beliefs, and mindset, need to be taken into account to determine the right psychotherapeutic approach for you. This is done by professional psychotherapy assessment. Even one single session with an experienced practitioner could potentially save you a lot of wasted time, effort and money on misdiagnoses and the wrong therapeutic approach.

Consideration of your particular history, needs, expectations, values, lifestyle, beliefs, and mindset, need to be taken into account to determine the right psychotherapeutic approach for you. This is done by professional psychotherapy assessment. Even one single session with an experienced practitioner could potentially save you a lot of wasted time, effort and money on misdiagnoses and the wrong therapeutic approach.

You can attend sessions in-person if you live locally, or online if you live elsewhere in the world. Appointments are booked the same way via the Appointments page.

I work online with patients from all over the world* including all parts of the UK, Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and other places where English-speaking patients reside or travel. Wherever you live in the world and however you are travelling you can receive effective help and professional support at home or on the move: all you need is a laptop or smartphone.

*Exceptions detailed on the appointments page

If you are on a budget and thinking that fortnightly sessions would be more affordable, I generally advise against this due to the fact that it is very difficult to maintain therapeutic momentum with less than weekly attendance. Similarly, trying to address complex or long-standing matters in a few sessions is a false economy, and won’t tend to work. Fortnightly sessions, in my experience, extend therapy proportionally much longer than weekly attendance to achieve the same results. And trying to squeeze your needs into only a few sessions will only create stress and result in little, if any, real change.

My advice to patients where funding is a concern is to spend time saving so that they can comfortably afford weekly attendance with an experienced, skilled practitioner offering the right psychotherapy, rather than fewer or cheaper sessions with someone less experienced or skilled who may be offering what ChatGPT says is the best approach. Like anything else in life, accurate assessment, quality and regularity of support are better value for money that ‘quick and cheap’.

Alternatively, if money is tight, you could try asking for a referral to free NHS psychotherapy via your GP or psychiatrist. But the NHS tends to focus on very brief therapy, and is often heavily dependent upon brief counselling or CBT up to 12 sessions. Some NHS Trusts have a a bit more of a range of therapies, such as psychodynamic, cognitive-analytic, or CBT-derived approaches like DBT. But again, typically NHS budgets only allow for minimal sessions, and in my experience of working as a psychotherapist in the NHS, both the types of therapy and the numbers of sessions offered are often inadequate to cater for patient needs. Waiting times also tend to be lengthy, and there is rarely scope for being able to choose who you work with.

Generally speaking, shorter-term work is more appropriate for counselling and symptom-management that focusses on specific symptoms and methods to address those symptoms. Longer-term work is required for depth psychotherapy and resolving the root causes of your symptoms.

Regular weekly sessions of 50 minutes duration are standard practice regardless of duration of therapy. 50 minute sessions allow you to concentrate on your goals at a steady pace, maintain momentum, develop new habits, and apply what you gain from each session during the week.

30 minute sessions are available for online work via video meeting. They are generally more appropriate for Introductory Meetings, and extra sessions when you need a bit more input in addition to your weekly session.

However, depending upon your problems and needs identified at assessment, 30 minute weekly sessions may be appropriate for less complex needs, subject to assessment, and for meditation and yoga tuition. Short sessions are generally not suitable when you have more serious or enduring needs that require more session time and in-depth understanding.

50 minute sessions can be attended either in-person or online. Full sessions are necessary for serious psychotherapy work, and your specific needs can be discussed during an Introductory Meting or your assessment sessions.

Various modalities and levels of support and challenge are available in this practice that are explained to you in detail so that you can understand what is best for you. You can adjust support and challenge at any time throughout your therapy.

Level 1

Counselling is the least challenging approach, offering the most space to explore your experiences with usually fairly gentle input from the therapist.

Level 2

Symptom-management is more structured, and focussed on containing, managing, regulating, channelling, and expressing your experiences, so that you can feel more grounded in yourself, with relief from inner struggles and tensions.

Level 3

Integrative Psychotherapy - as I practice it* - can help you bring your mind and body into harmony, reducing the internal struggles you have with yourself and others, as in addictions, phobias, social anxiety, relationship problems etc. The somatic or body focus of psychotherapy can help you heal your nervous system and strengthen your ability to manage and ground your life around self-care, greater meaning and purpose.

Patients who benefit from Integrative Psychotherapy the most are those who place greater value on long-term truth and harmony, than on short-term comfort or pleasure, and who prefer more interaction and open collaboration with their psychotherapist than is commonly offered by conventional approaches. Patients who are open to having their lifestyles, beliefs, habits, assumptions and self-defeating behaviours explored, and challenged when appropriate, will readily make gains in depth psychotherapy. (Those who remain defensive and resistant to change and any challenge to their comfort zone will benefit little from any form of psychotherapy, in my experience. And counselling may be more beneficial for them). New skills and awarenesses can then be formed for greater authenticity, self-reliance, self-respect, better self-care, self-confidence and clarity of purpose in life.

Level 4

Existential Analysis - as I practice it* - is a form of depth psychotherapy that goes deeper into the psyche by looking at the internal and external dynamics that create your life struggles, and the bigger perspective of your place in life personally, relationally, culturally and spiritually. Analysis can be as challenging and supportive as you request it to be. But the deeper you go into your psyche the more honesty is required of you in the relationship. Many people, for example, like the idea of being more authentic, but few are able to rise to the challenge because it is scary and difficult to do so in a society that has conditioned all of us from childhood to confuse and conflate our identities with the social masks we have rehearsed and worn all our lives. This ‘appearing to be genuine’ starts in childhood with people pleasing. Many people say they want to be more authentic, for example. But in our society this often means creating a more authentic-looking appearance, rather than actually becoming more honest or genuine in our thoughts, intentions, words, or actions. This is a common fallacy of revising one’s social mask as a make-over, rather than working to deepen one’s inner truth, courage, integrity, and conscience so that one’s outward actions are driven from the inside-out. Great honesty, however, allows you to face and resolve deeper conflicts that drive more enduring problems.

Level 5

For the braver, working on your personal authenticity can include electing to address and resolve your ‘shadow’, or the less appealing aspects of your Ego, personality and habits that most individuals make great efforts to conceal or deny in themselves. Again, many people convince themselves they want to be more authentic, but then balk when they realise that qualities they have denied, suppressed or tried to hide have, in fact, been visible to others all along. Facing denied aspects of the psyche at least allows us to accept them or to revise them. Whilst very challenging, some of the many benefits of this deeper work on the Ego include resolving culturally-acquired narcissism. This brings greater inner peace and feelings of wholeness for most people, as the direct result of fostering greater personal integrity. Enduring security and a surer sense of identity typically follow, with genuine confidence founded on truth rather than on maintaining a facade; greater humility, clarity of one’s true values and purpose, a deeper and more courageous trust in your own personal wisdom and intuition. Greater authenticity gives us the opportunity to drop the false social masks that often drain our energies, ruin our intimate relationships, deepen our insecurities, and defeat our efforts to realise our true nature and potential.

Level 6

The deeper we travel into authenticity, the more the spiritual relevance of one’s life becomes apparent. This is the level at which existential awareness helps us see the landscape of our lives with greater perceptual clarity and a felt sense of knowing. It becomes possible to live with greater depth; going deeper instead of of allowing the Ego to race further ahead. Even if your belief system is firmly rooted in science, the spiritual dimension remains just as relevant. It is often only the vocabulary that is different. And by ‘spiritual’ I’m referring to something deep, meaningful and serious, not a New Age religious veneer or fashion statement. Genuine spirituality tends to be private, humble, and self-effacing, not outwardly showy.

What level is right for you?

If you only need to focus on your everyday life struggles with much less effort and challenge in sessions, then opting for counselling is a good place to start. If you have neglected yourself for a longer period of time to the point where you struggle with discreet and difficult symptoms, then symptom-management might be best for you as a starting point until you can go deeper into what caused your symptoms. If you want challenge, depth and resolution of the root causes of your life difficulties, and are willing to do the work, then depth psychotherapy will suit you. Depth work can stay at Level 4 or go deeper if you want. You can work at any and all of these levels of support and challenge within this practice according to your specific needs.

*These approaches are not formulaic methods practiced from text books. Practitioners formulate their own ways of working based on core values and principles rather than fixed protocols or techniques.