Psychotherapy & Counselling

Thinking through our problems, often on our own or via google self-help searches, can often lead us around in circles or we feel alone in the world with the issue. Counselling and psychotherapy can help make sense of what is going on, incorporate a better understanding of your feeling and intuition and allow you to make new links perhaps with your family scripts or past experiences to find the courage to move forward in life.

Working as a therapist in Berkhamsted or London, client feedback the two most important goals they have benefited from are; a) that they develop a loving, compassionate and curious interest to who they are and what makes them unique as an individual, with acceptance and b) they feel better able to tackle current and new challenges with deeper emotional resilience. As a keen believer in the quality of embracing space and reflection, I teach clients that being better able to assess when in life to act, or when to sit back and reflect, will radically change the way they view life’s challenges.

Below I outline some of the core areas that I specialise in. However, I understand that approaching therapy can be a complicated task so early on I will work with the client to explore what are the key issues or changes they seek to make and ensure that any model or proposed way of working is easy to understand, and as we are working together as a team on this. The key areas I cover;

Relationship Focussed Therapy

Therapy for Business Leaders

Reducing Depression and
Anxiety

Counselling or Coaching
for couples

Overcoming blocks and life crisis

Working with Trauma and EMDR

Reducing depression and anxiety

Over time I have therefore sought to bring a focus in my therapeutic work how the primary issue or issues causing distress, anxiety or depression is related to the client’s relationship to others, relationship to self-such as career change or a distorted relationship such as an addiction.

On assessment I may recommend to a client that we work in a more solution focussed way to address the presenting issue, and with depression and anxiety, how we support you feeling like you can get started and in control of mental health.

This means working therapeutically and with practical tools and techniques to facilitate doing things differently and building personal effectiveness.

Presenting issues this will work well with includes; social anxiety, assertive and confidence building, working with students and exam stress. My solution focussed work draws on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Transactional Analysis and the new exciting thinking emerging from Neuroscience to allow the client to rationalise and make sense of a distress within easy to understand model and get moving.

Work delivered by Creative Insight Talking Therapies Limited Company House number 11538159

Over coming personal blocks and life crisis

Drawing on existential therapy and thinking, sometimes arriving at midlife the world can feel a depressing or disappointing place, and personal dreams remained unfulfilled, but the client is feeling unclear how to move forward or reconnect to a sense of hopefulness. At times a life crisis or sabotaging event can be a sign that there is an existential anxiety.

I believe the role of therapy can help clients during those dark times to enquire into the role of a personal crisis, new found loneliness, and in my experience the process can help people to rediscover their individual self. Therapy can prove a valuable space during a busy time to reflect on concepts such as what ‘is my purpose’ and ‘ how do I create meaning in this difficult world’.

This work allows the space to freely discuss the answers to these questions and importantly have the courage to address the blocks. This process can also require the client to confront long held beliefs that one might need to change or let go of, in order to move forward, as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche challenged us to consider in his observation” sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed”.

Therapy for business and leaders

A therapy space that is designed to support people who might initial be sceptical to therapy meeting their needs. I draw on my experience in business and as CEO as well as my clinical training, to offer clients in professional and management roles practical tools and techniques, with minimal therapy language, to gain a perspective or manage a problem that they bring.

This also includes introducing concepts of neuroscience and the role of brain chemistry to help people make sense of the beliefs, actions and feelings that can cause distress, and better understand depression and anxiety. In my experience the way I work with a balance of insight therapy and solution focused goals, has in particularly helped professionals who are new to this field to find therapy accessible.

I find high performing individuals also benefit from psychotherapy to help them deal with a specific crisis, become a more well-rounded leader or to manage a pattern of behaviour and facilitate personal growth. This work can be solution-focused, working between 8-16 weekly sessions or evolve over a longer period of time.

In my experience, by offering specific work-focused goals, alongside more in-depth psychotherapy work, I can help you achieve greater personal effectiveness and equilibrium in your work/life balance. This work often can exploring core beliefs centred around power and responsibility. For example as a leader how to articulate and hold a sense of vulnerability in a personal crisis with the responsibility in a role. Other areas I have worked with is where leaders are seeking to be more effective in work relationships, anger or stress management, through a process of learning and accessing greater self awareness.

Working with dreams and creativity

Across the ages and culture dreams, art and creative imagination, have been consulted and accessed to better understand the unfolding process of an individual’s subtle inner world which is less conscious in their active life, and how through attention to this, there is personal growth.

This therapeutic work will therefore pay particular attention to your dreaming life, and working with the dreams you bring to help you better understand the emerging processes of the unconscious, and the person, better understanding patterns and themes in dreams. This approach can be particular valuable for people who are keen to work with greater creativity. The way I work draws on Carl Jung’s approach as well as the walking dream approach as described by Robert Johnson in his book Inner Work (published by HarperCollins books).

Freud noted that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, Carl Jung the founder of depth psychology and pupil of Freud’s believed that creative imagination and dreams was the gateway to personal development and our quest is to become more whole as individuals. This occurs as unconscious parts of ourselves become more conscious through attention to dreams and creative processes through therapy for example. In my experience paying attention to the dream language allows the client to better appreciate the full kaleidoscope of the change process and better understand who they are becoming, which can be more limited through paying attention more to thoughts and cognitive processes.