Samuel Waumsley
M.A. Clinical Psychology (UCT, 2010)
B.Soc.Sci. Hons (UCT); B.A. Hons (UCT); B.Soc.Sci. (UCT)
Trained at the UCT Child Guidance Clinic. Internship at Groote Schuur and Valkenberg Hospitals. Practice established in 2012. HPCSA Registered. Member of PSYSSA.
Research
Published a review of therapy done at the UCT Child Guidance Clinic between 1997 and 2007, in 2010, arguing that psychotherapy was shown to be generally useful to adults and children at the Clinic, across diverse South African socio-financial contexts, and that financially poorer individuals showed better adherance to therapy. Published in the South African Journal of Psychology .
Therapy
Brief-term interventions, or longer-term periods of work are available. The scope of work is determined according to the patient's feelings and needs. There is an initial period of consideration of suitability and fit for therapy together. Therapy can be scheduled flexibly.
Being conscious of one's feelings, contemplations and values is useful psychologically, and is a key method in psychotherapy. Arguably a down-to-earth, respectful and encouraging space is useful where issues can be thoughtfully considered in mutual positive regard. Engagement authentically in all things can be challenging to do honestly and wisely, but is arguably very useful to be conscious of as a tool.
Therapy process
1. Meeting, history-taking and describing issues at hand.
2. Building understanding around symptoms and challenges.
3. Deeply familiarise 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 clinical interest:
- Anxiety: Threat appraisal related feeling. Is associated with the fight, flight, freeze or friendly reflex. Sometimes anxiety seems to reflect external or internal tensions we feel. Anxiety can be a feeling of unease; of self-consciousness, of being threatened, or stressed.
- Panic attack: Heightened intense anxiety. Panic disorder includes symptoms like sudden increased heart rate, feeling faint, sweating, panic, and a feeling of impending doom, racing thoughts and shallow breathing. Often in panic attack arguably psychological factors, like emotion or worry impacts the physiological, and demands to be heard.
- Self-esteem: Our sense of self is critical, informing our day to day functioning. Seeking confidence in itself is perhaps a useless task; searching for authenticity in ourselves, however, is a clearer and more nourishing goal. Our sense of self and our conditioned experience of self-trust is fundamental to us and our functioning easily.
- Socio-economic stress: as toxic psychologically, as a professional research interest. Neuropsychologically-speaking people have a brain area for callibrating social fairness - we are one species living in a shared global social space with an abundance of resources. Too many live under the toxic stress of endebtedness in arguably ruthless low-wage, high interest-charging, low corporate tax systems. There is evidence a paradigm shift may be unfolding now socio-financially towards a more humane social equality.
- Real ethics: Baruch Spinoza's historical book Ethics outlined that one's values as people stand as universal and natural elements of human life and thinking. In psychotherapy one's values are central, as they speak to and underpin what we think is fair and how we respond justly personally.
- Depression: A feeling and problem that can involve our sense of narrative and sense of self in life, and our experience of and response to the world and existing as a person. It can be useful to consider depression as a burn-out, a woundedness of one's hope perhaps or dignity. Depression can feel like hopelessness, and people commonly have feelings of guilt or low-worth as well.
- Dream interpretation: Dreams are arguably the ruminations of our unconscious mind, mulling over, forming perspectives and dream scapes 'subconsciously'. In that process there is often an objective mirroring of life, of our feeling, and in terms of meaning that one can pick up on in dreams.
- Ecopsychology: Tuning into our primal psycho-evolutionary homo sapien forebears and into one's human intergenerationally developed psychology, feelings and instincts - over eons - and multitudes of generations, as part of nature and the natural world, is profound. Nature is to be encountered and cherished, in ouselves and in practices like 'nature bathing' for example, or being in natural places. Ecology also brings to mind social-financial corruptions like corporate pollution, deforestation, poor farming ethics, and fossil fuel climate change, which upset everyone on some level and stand as crimes in the history of the world. Deep ecology speaks to the mystery and profundity of life and nature and to its and our own natural richness and depth.