My Approach to Psychotherapy
Understanding how you experience yourself, others and the world you inhabit
When I first meet someone, I am interested in trying to understand the world as they experience it. We each arrive with a history, relationships, identities and ways of making sense of what has happened to us. Some of these are easy to describe. Others have become so familiar that we barely notice them.
I sometimes imagine joining someone at an outpost in a landscape they have been navigating for much longer than I have. I want to understand what the terrain looks like from where you stand, including the routes you know well, where you feel able to go and where you don’t.
I can’t entirely leave my own perspective behind, and I don’t think a therapist can become a blank slate. I can try to hold my assumptions lightly and remain open to being wrong. At times I will offer what I notice or how I am understanding something, and we can see what happens when my perspective meets yours.
Meeting you in your world
The relationship between us
The relationship we develop is central to how I work. My practice remains grounded in the person centred tradition and in Rogers’ conviction that being genuinely met, accepted and understood by another person can itself bring about change.
Therapy also gives us a relationship in which to encounter one another. How you experience me, and how we negotiate trust, difference, misunderstanding, closeness or distance, may tell us something that could be difficult to discover by talking about relationships elsewhere in your life.
There can also be significance in having another person recognise something that has previously been borne alone. An experience may have been known to you for years and yet change when it can finally be acknowledged in the presence of somebody else.
How our worlds take shape
We develop ways of meeting the world long before we have words for them. Our histories and relationships leave traces in what we expect from other people, what we protect, what we fear and what we take ourselves to be. Psychodynamic thinking contributes to my curiosity about how the past continues to make itself felt in the present.
I am also interested in contradiction. We can long for intimacy and resist being known. We can resent an obligation while finding purpose in it. We might desperately want something to change while also needing to preserve what is familiar. I don’t assume that these tensions need to be tidied away. Staying with them can sometimes tell us more than deciding which side is the correct one.
This is one reason I resist reducing a person to a diagnosis, pattern or explanation. A person is not finished. We continue to be shaped by what happens to us, by our encounters with other people, and by how we respond.
Possibility and choice
Existential approaches have particularly influenced how I think about freedom, responsibility and the limits we encounter in living. We don’t choose the circumstances into which we arrive, much of what happens to us, or many of the constraints within which we have to live. Yet we are continually faced with having to respond.
Freedom itself can create tension. Choosing one possibility often means relinquishing another. We may want certainty before acting when certainty isn’t available. We can want to belong without losing our individuality, to rely on others without surrendering our autonomy, or to accept what cannot be changed while still wanting life to be different.
Therapy might not resolve these contradictions for us. It can give us somewhere to encounter them more deliberately, including the ways our previous experiences have narrowed what seems possible. We can consider what can be changed, what opposing truths may need to be lived with, and what you want to take responsibility for in the life you are living now.