Brief & long-term therapy
I use psychodynamic and existential therapy as well as cognitive and relational psychology.
It's crucial to consider how a person feels: what experience and perspective has shaped them. Existential and psychodynamic therapy imagine that the human condition is innately challenging, and deeply psychological and emotional; transcendental. Finding a stance: a style - a method to navigate this milieu is useful.
Being conscious of one's own feelings, contemplations and values is one way to do this: reaffirming meaning, logic, and through using metacognition - conscious reflection.
Professional interests:
- Anxiety: The feeling of anxiety is usually a general feeling of unease and disquiet internally; a feeling of restlessness. Muscle tension, sleep disturbance, poor concentration, irritability and fatigue can also be associated with anxiety. Anxious feelings can take the form of generalised anxiety, social anxiety and panic attacks.
- Panic attacks: Can include symptoms like increased heart rate, feeling faint, sweating, panic and a feeling of impending doom, racing thoughts and, or shallow breathing. The body's automatic response to stress the hyphothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis can be chronically activated in anxiety sufferers.
- Depression: Signs of depression can include feeling hopeless, thoughts about death, despair, a feeling of low motivation, dysphoria, indecision, feelings of guilt, low-concentration, insomnia, weight changes, loss of interest in activities previously enjoyed - anhedonia, and, or sadness, for more than two weeks. Depression can take multiple forms and can be lethally dangerous if not taken seriously.
- Esteem: Our sense of self and conditioned experience of self-trust is fundamental to us. We come from what we know and have seen, often that becomes internalised and repeated negatively. The truth (in scientific evidence and the debate) is that we are all the same: intelligent modern great apes; warm-hearted and collaborative by nature; with a strong innate sense of fun and fairness. Given this universality of the human condition then it's not about us: it's about what happened to us, and where we are now.
- Ecopsychology: A side of psychology considering deep ecology and embracing in real experience the connection we have to nature psychologically.
- Dream interpretation: Dreams are the work of the deep mind. In interpreting dreams the person's associations to images and to the story in the dream are helpful.
