Psychological Therapies
Counselling Psychology
Counselling psychology can offer a safe and compassionate space to start exploring and understanding yourself, your emotions and unhelpful patterns that may not be serving you. It can support you to take the needed the steps needed to bring about meaningful change, underpinned by psychological theory and research. The therapeutic relationship is of fundamental importance to the process.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a type of therapy that helps you address emotional difficulties by understanding how thoughts, behaviours and physiology influence to our emotional experience and maintain problems. CBT looks to address, using various methods or strategies, unhelpful thoughts and behaviours to bring about emotional relief. CBT can be symptom focussed but can also address underlying problematic beliefs or behavioural patterns. A CBT approach will support you to implement tasks and or skills between sessions.
Schema Therapy
Schema therapy is an integrative form of psychotherapy that combines elements of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and psychodynamic therapy. It was primarily developed to address chronic difficulties or problematic life patterns (or schemas) such as excessive people-pleasing, difficulties in meeting your needs and setting boundaries, overworking, problematic relationships, and compulsive or avoidant tendencies, to name a few. Schema therapy helps you understand your underlying schemas as the result of unmet childhood emotional needs. It also helps you recognize the ways you may have learned to cope with these needs, which may no longer be serving you, and find ways to meet your emotional needs in healthier and more life-affirming ways. Along with cognitive and behavioural strategies, schema therapy employs experiential techniques to facilitate change at a more emotional level.
EMDR Therapy
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR) is an evidence-based therapy designed to help individuals heal from trauma and other distressing life experiences. Unlike traditional talk therapy, EMDR uses bilateral stimulation to help individuals process the intense emotions associated with traumatic or distressing experiences, reframe negative beliefs, and alleviate symptoms such as hyper-arousal and depression. EMDR is recommended as a treatment for PTSD by the World Health Organisation and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
Initial Steps
You may want to arrange an initial 10-minute introductory call or provide some information to help determine whether I can assist with the issues you are seeking help for. We would then schedule an initial consultation. The aim of these initial meetings is to gain a deeper understanding of your difficulties, learn about your background history, and start building a psychological formulation of the issues to identify an appropriate approach for you.
Taking into consideration your goals, the nature of your issues, and the evidence base, we would discuss whether you prefer a fixed number of sessions, which can be reviewed, or an open-ended arrangement until the work concludes. If I feel I am not the right clinician or service to assist you, I can provide recommendations for onward help.
