What is Psychotherapy?
I feel that Psychotherapy is a practice of inner care. Psychotherapy supports individuals who wish to learn how to navigate their own emotional, and psychological workings towards restoring whole health, preventing disease, and improving quality of life and happiness. Oddly while individuals tend to seek support for their external bodily health, fewer seek support for their inner body-mind. And yet evidence strongly suggests that health and well being is deeply related to the inner care of the emotional, psychological and meaning-making dimensions of who we are. Unfortunately most people have disconnections to their inner selves and in many cases individuals only notice their inner life once something goes wrong in their lives. For examples you may find yourself "off-track" or facing some difficult challenges or patterns, or have relationship problems or are facing some confusing feelings, thinking, behaviours or physical symptoms.
When worked with positively, these inner challenges can act like a navigational system built within us guiding us to where we need to be in our lives. Psychotherapy helps support a client in the midst of chaos, confusion or suffering or simply offers support for individuals experiencing life changes or support for those reaching a period in their life of deeper life questioning. Psychotherapy offers a rich opportunity to cultivate self awareness, compassion, guiding insights and resources. Individuals in therapy may experience an improved appreciation of feelings, thoughts and bodily reactions, improved creativity and energy and repaired relational experiences with themselves and others. Psychotherapy may also offer new opportunities for clients to examine unhealthy patterns of thought, emotion and behaviour, addictions, and destructive relationship patterns.
One goal of psychotherapy is to help clients learn to accept, understand and appreciate the work of their inner care intelligence so that they can better sort through the clues being offered to them through life's experience. Another goal of therapy is that it may support an individual to gradually feel safer to explore blocks or hurts, take new risks in decisions, and ultimately gain improved agency in life or experience deeper meaning and happiness.
In the therapeutic process I use many modalities taken from psychotherapy and tailor them in collaboration with my client uniquely to support my client's individual growth and needs. A key part of the therapy is the relationship and the creation of a therapeutic space that allows enough safety for deeper self awareness and exploration.
Details about Psychotherapy sessions?
If you are interested in Psychotherapy sessions, I offer a phone or video on-line consultation session. During this session we will discuss briefly your concerns, your goals, review any questions you have, discuss fees and scheduling and I will tell you more about my background and therapy approach. During this session, or during the assessment session that follows if we discover, for whatever reason, we are not a good match for psychotherapy, I will be happy to offer referrals for you based on your identified needs. My psychotherapy sessions last for 60 minutes and clients usually decide to commit to a regular schedule for a given number of sessions to address their main concern(s).
