Clients attend psychotherapy and counselling sessions (offered in Tooting, South London/Southampton, Hampshire/or online) with the express aim to speak freely. Really freely. In this way we hear a very different narrative to what we tell our friends, family and ourselves. Psychotherapy/Counselling teaches us an invaluable lesson - to learn to speak freely without defence. Defence mechanisms exist to protect us from experiencing painful feeling. We needed such 'armour' once to 'emotionally survive' perhaps, but they no longer always serve us in the present. In a nutshell, this is what Freud set out to achieve with the birth of psychoanalysis – to uncover what has been experienced as painful and is still being experienced as painful (but without our conscious knowledge of this)

The aim of speaking without censorship in psychotherapy/counselling appointments is not to feel sorry for ourselves, or to blame others, but to uncover what may still be effecting us without our conscious appreciation of this. The knowledge derived from psychotherapy and counselling attendance tells us why your symptoms developed – it illustrates that symptoms are the expression of what hasn’t been verbalised. As your psychotherapist/counsellor my ultimate aim is to help you make something conscious, thus the repressed ‘energy’ is directed away from symptoms (anxiety, depression, anger, phobias, etc) and into verbal expression. We work together for you to achieve much needed relief from cyclical and possibly destructive patterns of behaviour. Psychotherapy and counselling isn't 'magic' but actually it can feel pretty powerful and life changing. As a psychotherapist I am still in awe of the practice and the immense changes the process elicits in people.

In ‘unpacking’ what has been experienced in the past, and in ‘re-telling’ our story, we can at last see what we need to do to bring about change. In short, we are not boxing shadows any longer but we have clear goals to work on. As your psychotherapist and counsellor, whether this is 'in person' (South London/Southampton) or online, I hope that I encourage an interest and enthusiasm for implementing such goals.

Psychotherapy helps us learn about what has ‘been brushed under the carpet’ and what may have had a debilitating effect without ourselves being completely aware of the how and why.