How psychotherapy works

Psychotherapy is a place where you can express your feelings and emotions in complete confidence and be met kindly, and safely, with understanding and acceptance and wholehearted support from me as your therapist.

It may be that you want to look at whatever is not currently working well for you, that you might not ever talk about with anyone else. Or it may be that you want to gain a better understanding of yourself.

We’ll work together to gain deeper understanding of whatever brought you here in the first place, your inner world, and your feelings. This is where real transformations can begin, from a place of support and new insights and safety.

Relational psychotherapy

I work relation-ally, which means that the therapeutic relationship created between you and me, becomes a gentle yet powerful tool for understanding and knowing yourself better and with that, your potential to flourish.

We can work together for a short term or longer term, short term therapy tends to be on a specific issue that is troubling you, longer term therapy may also be on a specific issue or our work may be more broad reaching. Longer term work allows for deeper insights and understanding which lead to increased possibilities for change.

Private Counselling or Private Psychotherapy?

I am sometimes asked what the difference is between a counsellor and a psychotherapist and what they can offer. Put simply, counselling tends to be shorter term and focuses on one issue. Psychotherapy can start in this way, but allows clients to work with their therapist at a deeper level.

Whilst a psychotherapist can offer counselling, a counsellor cannot offer psychotherapy. The duration and depth of a psychotherapist’s training, allows her to work at a deeper level of insight and understanding with her clients.

My training

Psychotherapists train for a minimum of four years at post-grad level. Our training is theoretically exacting and there are high standards of practical requirements, in terms of the trainee psychotherapist’s own psychotherapy with a qualified psychotherapist, which must be ongoing throughout the training period, a minimum requirement of hours working with clients, as well as experience gained in a mental health provider setting. Psychotherapists must be in professional supervision at all times. Trainee and qualified psychotherapists are required to be members of a professional body, which in my case is the UKCP.

All of this is in the client’s best interests.

The most rigorous counselling training’s demand approximately half of these requirements.

You can find some great information on the NHS website about psychotherapy here: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/benefits-of-talking-therapy/