1:1 Psychotherapy
We will work together to make sense of your experiences of emotional distress, often felt as depression and anxiety, and understand what fuels it. This process bring relief, clarity and the ability to make meaningful change. We will focus on your emotions and how you feel them in your body. I will always strive to understand your own lived experience in the world and so we may think about how we may be different or similar.
Why Psychotherapy?
There are times in our life when we experience intense emotional distress. These feelings can include anxiety, sadness, anger, panic, grief, jealousy, longing, fear and resentment. Sometimes we might curiously feel numb. We all respond to these feelings differently.
We might feel depressed and may avoid friends and family, sleep a lot or a little, eat more or less than usual. It may be hard to enjoy things. For some of us these feelings might be so overwhelming that we don’t want to continue living.
We might feel intensely anxious, worry about many things, find it hard to relax and get easily annoyed or sometimes violent. There might be an underlying sense that something awful is going to happen.
These intense feelings may have been triggered by a recent event in our lives, e.g.
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a relationship breakdown
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a bereavement
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loss of a job
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an illness or accident
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a life stage transition: parenthood, fertility, caring for older parents, moving into adulthood, menopause, children leaving home, end of life
Sometimes we have experienced these feelings for many years or we have an idea that they are linked to old experiences or traumas, e.g.:
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relationships with parents
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abuse in childhood, including verbal, physical, sexual or neglect
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sexuality
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race & cultural differences
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domestic violence
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low self-esteem and low self confidence
Therapists in Training
As a trainee psychotherapist you may be required to be in therapy yourself. Having worked with trainees over the years, I know that this process can be both challenging and transformative.
In your personal therapy we will not only be attending to experiences in your life, past and present, but we shall also be thinking about how these may get activated in your training, your process groups and ultimately your client work.
Bilingual
I am bilingual in English and Greek, having lived and been educated in both Greece and England. We can work in both or either language which can support a deeper exploration of your experiences and the cultural norms you have lived with.
Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy
(DIT)
In our initial consultation we can explore whether DIT would be a helpful way to address your difficulties.
In DIT we explore past experiences, especially previous relationship difficulties, to understand how they may affect the way you feel and behave in the present. We shall bring these patterns to the fore and understand how they link to your symptoms of depression. You will understand yourself better and have the opportunity to change the ways in which you respond.
DIT is an evidence based 16 session therapy model used in the NHS.