Samuel Waumsley Clinical Psychologist
M.A. Clinical Psychology (University of Cape Town, 2010), B.Soc.Sci. Hons (UCT); B.A. Hons (UCT); B.Soc.Sci. (UCT)
Trainied at the UCT Child Guidance Clinic in 2008, in psychodynamic and humanistic psychotherapy. Private psychotherapy sessions. Practice established in 2012. HPCSA-registered.
Published a review in 2010, of therapy done at the UCT Child Guidance Clinic between 1997 and 2007, focusing on therapy outcomes, social class and access to services in the South African Journal of Psychology.
Psychotherapy
Briefer work available over a few sessions, or longer-term meetings. Sessions are scheduled according patients' own needs and pace. Being conscious of one's feelings, contemplations and values is arguably useful, and is central to therapy. I try to provide a down-to-earth, respectful and encouraging psychotherapy atmosphere.
Therapy process:
1. Meeting, history-taking and describing issues at hand.
2. Building understanding around symptoms and challenges.
3. Subsequent sessions work to familiarise ourselves with this dynamic understanding of the issues at play.
4. Continued focus on day to day life contemplatively and around ways to shift outcomes positively.
Professional focus:
- Anxiety: Threat appraisal. Is associated with the fight, flight or freeze reflex. We have a strong response to danger and stress that is automatic and that is neurochemically processed faster than we can register the stressor consciously, speaking to anxiety's unconscious elements. Sometimes anxiety can relate to external or deep 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 impact the physiological, and demand to be heard, and assuaged.
- Self-esteem: Is like a lens through which we see and operate in the world. Our sense of self is critical, informing our day to day feeling and functioning. Seeking confidence is perhaps a useless task; searching for authenticity in ourselves, however, is a clearer goal. Congruence in ourselves psychologically is an essential yardstick. In therapy we work to find clarity and positive consciousness in ourselves. Our sense of self and our conditioned experience of self-trust is fundamental to us. We come from what we know, often that becomes internalised and repeated in ways that are not useful.
- Depression: A feeling and problem that can perhaps sometimes involve our sense of narrative and sense of self in life, and our experience of and response to the world. It can be useful to consider depression sometimes as a burn-out, a woundedness. Depression can feel like hopelessness centrally, and people have feelings of guilt or low-worth. We may lose interest in things we liked, we may become uncertain about the point of things. That said, choosing to face and find space to process such experience can be helpful.
- Dream interpretation: Dreams are arguably the ruminations of our unconscious mind, mulling over, manufacturing perspectives and dream scapes 'subconsciously'. In that process there is often an objective mirroring of life, feeling and meaning that one can pick up in dreams. In interpreting dreams the person's associations to images and to the story in the dream are central.