• Time-limited or open-ended work

• Brief to long-term work

• Psychosocial assessments and support planning as standard

• Integrated methods that affect different levels of awareness, and that all work in synergy

• Optional support between sessions

Counselling is the least challenging approach, offering the most space to explore your experiences with usually fairly gentle input from your psychotherapist. It involves you talking about whatever concerns or interests you and your therapist reflecting back his understanding and impressions of what you are saying. Counselling can be helpful for making sense of an experience, for getting things off your chest, for finding your way, and for regaining perspective.

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 as you learn to self-regulate experiences that may have felt emotionally and mentally overwhelming.

Symptom management of trauma-related symptoms is also possible, using a variety of trauma-informed approaches, such as:

• EMDR

• BioFeedback Training

• EFT

• Art Therapy

• Yoga tuition

• Makko Ho

• Meditation tuition

• Stress awareness and management

• Somatic release work

• Other specific protocols developed by this practice.

Trauma Work is not simple symptom management, however, and must be done within a therapeutic relationship where trust and understanding have been well established between patient and therapist to make the work secure and effective. It thus requires support and challenge at level 3 and above.

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 that may appear as 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). 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, as you turn your fears and insecurities into confidence and courage.

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 need it to be. But the deeper you go into your psyche the more honesty and courage are required of you in the relationship. Many people, for example, like the idea of being more authentic, but far fewer 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 and to develop the courage to live with greater wisdom and integrity.

For the brave, working on your personal authenticity can include electing to address and resolve your the less appealing aspects of your Ego, personality and habits: things that you may have gone to great efforts to conceal or deny in yourself. 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 from everyone have, in fact, been visible all along. Facing denied aspects of the psyche (some call this ‘Shadow Work’) is not an exercise in shaming, but in coming to terms with oneself. It can be very challenging when done genuinely.

Facing the shadow is not designed to make patients feel comfortable or good about themselves, but to enable them to face the emotional discomforts of truths they have been routinely denying. Confronting one’s darkness at least allows us to accept what we find hidden, and to start the process of transcending and growing through previously denied aspects of our own Ego and carefully constructed social image. These denied aspects don’t disappear because we pretend they don’t exist. They actively drive destructive behaviours we simply disown and push out of awareness.

Whilst very challenging, some of the many benefits of this deeper work on the Ego include resolving both personal and culturally-acquired narcissism. Illumination and ownership of the shadow brings greater inner peace and feelings of wholeness for most people, as the direct result of fostering greater sobriety, personal integrity and honesty. Enduring security and a surer sense of identity typically follow, with genuine, quiet confidence founded on reality rather than on maintaining a facade or fantasy about oneself; 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.

The deeper we travel into authenticity, the more we shed the falseness, duplicity, and mimicry of others that are hallmarks of inauthentic society. The spiritual relevance of one’s life becomes apparent when we let go the vanity of our Ego. This is the level at which existential awareness helps us see the bigger landscape of our lives with greater perceptual clarity and a felt sense of intuitive knowing and perspective. It becomes possible to live with greater meaning; going deeper instead of allowing the Ego to race further ahead in its efforts to win an unwinnable race of its own making.

Even if your worldview is firmly rooted in strictly atheistic, materialistic, or scientific beliefs, the spiritual dimension of authenticity remains just as relevant at this level. It is often only the vocabulary and depth of awareness that differ. And by ‘spiritual’ I’m referring to something quiet, expansive, personally meaningful and serious, not a New Age religious veneer or fashion statement we adopt externally to make ourselves appear deep and serious. Genuine spirituality tends to be inwardly private, humble, earnest, and self-effacing, not outwardly showy or pretentious.

If you only need to focus on your everyday life struggles with much less effort and challenge in sessions, then opting for counselling may be 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 is causing 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. If you are an intelligent, conscientious person who values living with greater personal integrity, then depth psychotherapy will suit you well.

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