Samuel Waumsley
M.A. Clin. Psych. (UCT)
Registered Clinical Psychologist | Cape Town
Enquiries: samuelwaumsley@gmail.com
Phone: 0843502102
Monday - Friday 8am - 5pm
Therapy 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 pinch-points. A focus is on core personal narratives and perspectives, 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. 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 is psychotherapy about?
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. They can only be transferred, and transmuted satisfyingly arguably if we are warm-hearted and authentic to ourselves humanely and to others. 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. Sessions in my practice 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.
Areas of experience:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Panic feeling
- Esteem
- Intergenerational
- Attachment dynamic
- 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