Cape Town psychologist

Samuel Waumsley

M.A. Clin. Psych. (UCT)

Registered Clinical Psychologist | Cape Town

Enquiries: samuelwaumsley@gmail.com

Phone: 0843502102

Monday - Friday 8am - 5pm

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Well-being in our lives:

Therapy is a place for hearing personal stories that people carry, and finding ways to answer personal wounds and address psychological experience clearly and authentically. How does one respond to life's ups and downs; to rawer moments or to stark feeling? Perhaps we should respond with attunement to things. And we can seek this deep consciousness in life with the help of positive values - like equality and powerful -unbreakable universal dignity.

Therapy sessions in Cape Town:

Therapy allows you to hear your authentic reflections about life and everything else openly and clearly. We seek as detectives to understand personal cycles, needs and psychic traumas. A focus is on core personal narrative and perspective, and the symptoms that our life journey can bring about in us. In considering mental health matters we seek in psychotherapy to bravely address what our authentic psycho-emotional needs are, and where they come from -warmly and with advocacy for the self. I often work with:

Symptoms of anxiety: Anxiety is associated with the fight, flight, freeze, or friendly! reflex. As human beings we have a strong response to danger and stress that is highly attuned, automatic and that neurochemically is processed faster than we can register the stressor consciously. When one is anxious we can panic and really 'not remain calm' - freezing, rushing, becoming angry or agitated (with ourselves unhelpfully often or others) in high stress situations, sometimes that is chronically activated.
Signs of depression: Depression is arguably at its core a feeling to do with hopelessness or of meaninglessless -experience of the 'existential abyss' if you like. It can involve our sense of self in life and our experience. It can be useful to consider depression as also faintly bringing a challenge to the self. Often there is something wrong in our life, or in our worlds or in our lives before, or in what we were told that is felt deep down that bothers and depresses us. Sometimes we all need help in some form to break free from negative conclusions, cycles and entrapments.

What kind of psychotherapy service?

Psychology is a language. Feelings are data we receive and perceive from our personally-callibrated sensing of the world. Feelings are also like energy: they cannot be created in phantasy or delusion, nor destroyed in denial or projection. But they can be transferred, and transmuted satisfyingly if we are positive in our lives and authentic. Fairness towards ourselves is often overlooked. It doesn't mean excusing, it means acknowledging one's story, and one's truth, as well as one's mistakes. In recognising our scars and our patterns of behaviour and responses more, we seek to intuit ourselves more positively, consciously, constructively and naturally. I see therapy as detective work where we seek clues to ourselves -and solutions. Sessions are psychodynamic in orientation, also drawing on relational, existential, narrative and gestalt therapy perspectives. In-session techniques employed include Socratic dialogue, free-association, intersubjectivity/ transference reflection, as well as dream interpretation.

What does therapy do?

There is great depth to the human experience. How can we listen to this more? By being more aware of one's own needs and feelings to start with; next to others' around us, with calm assertiveness and positivity if we can, centered in warm-hearted values. Talk therapy sessions - 50 minute conversations - work to allow pertinent issues to surface in the therapeutic space. This can be in one session - or over weekly sessions as well as intermittently, fortnightly or monthly. In sessions we try to shift unconscious and conscious feeling by accessing pinch-points in mood, outlook, histories. We seek empowerment through positive appreciation of ourselves and others, as well as of existence.

>Therapy - what to expect:

1. Meeting, history-taking and describing issues at hand.

2. Building understanding around symptoms and challenges.

3. Deeply familiarising ourselves with this dynamic understanding of the issues at play.

4. Continued focus on day to day life contemplatively and on issues at play, while seeking ways to positively shift outcomes meaningfully.

Areas of experience:

Attachment dynamic
Anxiety
Depression
Panic attack
Self-esteem
Intergenerational themes
Metacognition
Implicit relational awareness
Socratic dialogue
Reject the projection
Solidarity with one's self
Burnout
Overwhelm
Dissociation
Life narrative
Subconscious reaction
Existential reflection
Calm assertiveness
Adult child-parent sessions
Online therapy
Dream interpretation