Exploring the landscape of your mind

I like the way psychoanalyst Adam Phillips described therapy in his book "Terrors and Experts":

“It turns panic into meaning. It makes fear bearable by making it interesting. It does this in the most ordinary way: through conversation with another person…Talking changes the way things look.”

As a therapist, I engage in such conversations.

My core training is in Psychodynamic practice. This modality uses the basic assumption that everyone has an unconscious mind. In it are confined experiences that have been too intense, frightening or painful to be faced. These are prevented from returning to awareness by powerful defences.

Such defences, originally designed to avoid suffering, can lead to adopting a mental inclination to act repeatedly in a certain way, creating a habit of thinking which locks us into patterns of behaviour over which we have less and less control. A lot of anxiety is produced in repressing true feelings. A sense of being overwhelmed, stuck or lost, not knowing how one has arrived at this particular place in life or where to go from there eventually emerges.

Together in therapy we will explore the landscape of your unconscious mind and examine how experiences from the past link with present issues.

Our relationship will be based on trust and will develop within the safety of a confidential space. We will meet at the same time each week, for the same duration, at the same location for an agreed period of time. Such boundaries protect our space together and make it a safe environment where difficult thoughts and feelings can be explored at your own pace.