Philosophy

The essential ethos of our therapeutic work is to practice with thoughtfulness and compassion. The philosophy is straightforward – we believe issues that arise in ourselves, our relationships and through the course of our lives benefit from reflection and professional attention and discussion.

Thoughts about your experience and behaviour tend to remain within your own internal dialogue until opened up to another. Bringing in a professional perspective can be beneficial as a counter-point to the otherwise closed system of your own internal thoughts and feelings. A true dialogue with another who is well-equipped to consider different ways of looking at your familiar emotional landscape brings light, fresh perspectives and often new paths forward.

If you look closely at your most pressing issues, you may well discover similarities and patterns that are familiar from the past and that grow to become more urgent, or even reach crisis point if not attended to in a meaningful and effective way.

As well as addressing issues, psychotherapy and counselling are designed to be a developmental process. We believe mental/emotional and even spiritual development is a lifelong task. You cannot control everything that happens in your life, we are all subject to what happens to us, but there are often choices as to what we bring to what happens. Experience shows that the partnership of a professional relationship generates a process that provides new and different choices and possibilities and deepens your self-awareness as you go. Both clinical experience and research have demonstrated that new experiences arise from the evolving therapeutic relationship and process that facilitates healing from open (emotional) wounds, overcomes the consequences of trauma, repairs the damage from past abandonments, betrayals and disappointments, creates new neuronal pathways in the brain at a biological level, and assists in feeling better and functioning more creatively and productively.

The strain of living has become greater and more burdensome for many people, especially following the advent of the Covid pandemic and adverse changes in the economic landscape. Lightening your load, cultivating a more playful relation to living, making space for rest, exercising the body, and feeding the soul is all desirable in living a more meaningful and agreeable life.

For those with an academic interest, our work in psychotherapy is informed by European continental philosophy, especially existentialism and phenomenology, psychoanalysis – especially relational psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan, RD Laing, John Heaton and Donald Winnicott – and spiritual directions, especially Buddhism, Zen, and various traditions of yoga and meditation.