I am an Integrative Psychotherapist based in Stoke Newington, on the border of Dalston.
I offer a private, strictly confidential and non-judgemental service. I stress the last point in the belief that psychotherapy has the potential to be one of the few truly non-judgemental relational spaces available to us. It focuses on the individual's experience, however challenging, highlighting those that for various reasons remain largely unexpressed or unacknowledged – perhaps because they are painful, frightening, overwhelming, shameful or simply seen as wrong.
Having an integrative training, my practice is informed by multiple modalities, including humanistic/person centred, systemic, existentialist and CBT approaches. The core is however psychodynamic, which for me centres on three primary areas. The first is loss, which may concern death, but more often refers to areas of loss within relationships – loss of care, respect, support, consideration, desire, etc. The second is trauma, and although loss can certainly be experienced as traumatic, trauma emphasises an element of violation which may not be present in loss. It describes experiences which breach or break the 'usual order of things'; brutal or frightening experiences which have little place within our conception of the world or within the world as it is seen by society generally. These two areas refer to an injury. Psychotherapy cannot change the fact that it happened. It instead works with the third area of focus, the response to injury. How did one adapt in order to be able to live with loss and trauma, and might there be other ways of doing so? Ones which are perhaps less costly – less destructive and painful? These are ingrained patterns – defence mechanisms and modes of coping – that we are hardly aware of. We notice them only indirectly from the evidence of our stumbling. Clearly something is wrong, but it is hard to say what or why exactly. Why am I stuck in this situation? Why does the same thing always seem to happen to me? Why can I no longer function properly or as I would like to? Why have I become this person? Why do I do this thing? Why do I treat people in this way? Why can't I grieve? What are these feelings about? Why do I feel nothing? Why am I so overwhelmed by anxiety, depression, anger, sorrow?
I know that getting in touch with one’s emotions, is a therapy cliché. But I think that it is one for a reason. Emotions orient us; they give us direction. They are one of the ways, probably the most important way, that we have of deciding a stance in relation to the world; emotions drive choice and behaviour. There are two broad issues that come up in relation to feeling. The first, can appear in the guise of feeling too much, and the second, too little. The one is truly about the displacement of emotion, and the other about the suppression of it. In the first, the problem is that we act on feeling, without full justification. I.e., the emotion driving us, is at least partly, a reaction to some other experience. If emotion is informative, then the problem is one of blindness or partial knowledge. In the second, a disavowal of feeling, the issue is more one of incapacitation. If feeling is disallowed, it cannot provoke choice, action, and change. Both situations provide a justification for “getting in touch with one’s feelings”, and this is something that is ongoingly a part of my practice. It is often the case that emotion provides the missing key to a stuck situation.
Although I find that insight is often enough to provoke a desired change, at other times, direct behavioral alterations are required. This is often the case with anxiety and eating disorders for instance. CBT (cognitive behavior therapy) is immensely helpful in this regard, as many of its strategies are designed to target behaviour. In my own work, I use theoretical insights derived from CBT, but not in a manualized way that would for instance involve homework. For me it is more about psychoeducation. That is, understanding how certain behaviors maintain a condition or situation. I find that if behavioral cause and effect links are repeatedly highlighted, and their relationship clearly understood, then this provides the necessary framework for changing a causal behaviour.
I would be very happy to answer any questions or queries so please feel free to contact me for further information, or to discuss setting up an initial appointment.