My Therapeutic Approach
While I have over 10 years of experience working with of a range of evidence based psychological therapies and modalities….what I offer is a therapeutic experience with me, that will feel
Safe, Creative, Grounding, Nourishing, Collaborative, Caring, Authentic and Empowering.
In our modern busy western world, so many of us have learnt to switch off from our bodies and live inside the depths & crevasses of our minds. This often leads to experiences of anxiety, depression, numbness, disconnection, emotional isolation and loneliness amongst others experiences.
At Sage Psychological Therapy, I work with individuals, (18 years +), to help them (re)discover and (re)connect with themselves and work on living their best life.
Common Challenges I work with:
- Anxiety, panic disorders, OCD
- Depression, low mood, low motivation
- Unhelpful coping strategies, self-harming, binge eating, substance misuse.
- Feeling of emotional disconnection, numbness, stuckness
- Relationship difficulties, conflict
- Emotional distress and dysregulation
- Sleep disturbances
- Eating disorders, self-image, body image, self esteem
- Trauma/PTSD
- Life stage changes
- Grief and Loss
Special Area’s of Interest:
Some of the psychological modalities that have influenced my work
While the relationship between us is the first and most powerful tool that I draw on, here are a number Evidence Based Psychological Modalities that influence my work also.
This approach looks to unearth our unhelpful protective mechanisms that we have developed through our life span, as a result of not having our core needs meet in childhood.
Schema Therapy is really effective if you are…
- Open to working collaboratively with me – it’s a very active therapy process.
- Wanting to look at your unhelpful patterns and how these have been standing in the way of connection with yourself and others
- Want to delve deeper into your childhood experiences and how this has made you the person you are today.
If you would like to delve deeper to understand how Schema Therapy can help, keep reading below.
Read more & Videos
Every child can develop a healthy sense of themselves and an ability to connect with their outer worlds through experiencing
- Connection with others that is safe, predictable, and nurturing
- Autonomy to explore, make decision, have choices, learn to make mistakes
- Play, have fun, use their imaginations, laugh and be children
- Spontaneity to decide as they go and not to feel over controlled by planning
- Limits, experience healthy boundaries and be told No from the adults around them from time to time, with an understanding of why..
- Assertion, have the confidence to say No, if they don’t want to do something and assert their own healthy boundaries.
Perhaps we had a parent who was emotionally unpredictable or the opposite, over controlling and never given us space to be ourselves.
Maybe our care givers were emotionally unavailable due to illness, addiction or their because they were too busy with work or other things
When these core needs have not been met by our care givers in childhood, we develop unhelpful behaviours to protect ourselves from the pain and hurt. We can develop unhelpful thinking styles later as adults which prevent us from living our best lives.
Common unhelpful adult thoughts are things like: “I’m unlovable,” “I’m a failure,” “People don’t care about me,” “I’m not important,” “Something bad is going to happen,” “People will leave me,” “I will never get my needs met,” “I will never be good enough,”.
Schema Therapy helps us to map out our emotionally protective behaviours.
We overcompensate in behaviours and relationships to avoid these painful thoughts with becoming people pleasers, defensive, lack in boundaries or in our ability to self sooth. We can often develop unhelpful coping strategies, through alcohol, drugs, sex, exercise, food just to name a few.
These thoughts/ self-commentary and behaviours can often be so ingrained and automatic that you may not even be aware of them. Working with me in therapy is an active process of me supporting you to become aware of these unhelpful patterns and start to challenge their unhelpfulness. Through building a trusting and caring therapeutic relationship with me first – I can help you to grow your healthy adult part so that you can eventually become your own internal therapist.
Therapy with me is an active process of building trust and connection as well as sense of safety in our relationship, together. Once our safety is established I will invite you to start to separate out all the different parts of yourself – so that we can speak to them separately. This is done through techniques such as “chair work”, “Inner child work” and “imagery rescripting”.
Why it really is all about your Childhood?
Overcoming bad inner voices
CBT is a process of becoming aware of your thoughts, feelings and behaviours and seeing how they are all linked together in a cycle. Sometimes we are stuck in unhelpful cycles that create unhelpful behaviours. These cycles are so ingrained that they are difficult to notice at first, however with time we can work together to identify them and practice challenging and changing these cycles, so you can live your best life.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is really effective if you are..
- Experiencing anxiety, low mood, depression, OCD, eating difficulties,
- Want skills and tools to manage you are here and now, day to day.
- Like tangible solutions and are willing to do the work and practice the skills outside of session.
- like diagrams and visual ques as well as handouts and writing diaries
If you would like to delve deeper to understand how CBT can help, keep reading below…
Read more and Videos
Are you experiencing low energy and motivation?
Perhaps you have been avoiding situations because of anxiety?
Are you struggling with making connections with partners, friends and families because you feel numb or switched off?
Perhaps the emotions have become so overwhelming that you are self-harming or resorting to excessive drinking or using other drugs, food or sex to distract and relieve you from painful thoughts, emotions or sensation…
This following video explains further what I mean by these thoughts, emotions, and behaviours
DBT is a type of cognitive behavioural therapy that involves us working together on skills to help you become better able to manage emotionally triggering situations in your life.
Learning these emotional tools and skills in DBT help you to respond to those surges of emotions that often feel out of our control which result in us saying or doing things that we later maybe regret.
These intense emotional experiences can make us feel like ‘no one gets me’, ‘no one understands how to help’, ‘no one knows how hard it has been for me’.
DBT helps us in connecting with our inner emotional surges and thoughts so we can express our needs to the people around us in a more grounded, effective and healthy way.
DBT is really helpful if you are wanting to work on:
- Distress tolerance – Helping you to increase your ability to self sooth when triggered emotionally.
- Interpersonal communication – to help you to first identify and acknowledge your needs and then learn to communicate them effectively, especially when you are feeling emotionally triggered
- Emotional regulation - which helps us to slow everything down, when we feel intense emotional overwhelm or chaos.
- Mindfulness Skills: so that overall difficult emotions can become a more tolerable as we learn tolerate our fight, flight or freeze responses when feeling emotionally triggered by people, place and things.
Want to delve a little deeper into how DBT has help you?…keep reading below
During therapy we will look at times when you’ve felt emotionally overwhelmed or triggered by people, places and things and try to slow everything down and re-write that script.
Over time with practice, by you and encouragement and support from me, you will notice how increasing our awareness of our thought and behaviour- patterns can lead us to challenge and change them for the better.
We will work on how you relate to yourself and slow everything down to really understand it, therefore allowing us to become objective about our behaviours and change the unhelpful ones.
We then develop how you communicate what you need from others, so that they can better understand you also. Overall you should notice an improvement in you communication with loved ones and in turn allowing you to feel more connected, less emotionally isolated and dysregulated.
My Core Therapeutic Values and Ethos
At the core of my therapeutic practice, I facilitate a space to explore your emotional needs.
A common theme arising can be our attachment styles and how this influences our relationships and our way of relating to our inner selves and outer worlds.
Using a systems approach and trauma informed practices, therapy becomes a process of unearthing our protective strategies that we use to shelter from pain and suffering. These protective strategies may have served a purpose for you in the past, in making you feel safe and in control, but perhaps this wall of protection is now so strong you cannot reach anyone or anything beyond it.
People I have worked with in the past often refer to these experiences, as “being stuck”, “feeling numb”, “overwhelmed with emotions” “disconnected” “switched off” “heavy” “emotionally angry” “out of control” “alone” “impulsive” “passive” amongst others. Common references to these struggles also include terms like, anxiety, depression, fear, as well as grief.
Overall, regardless of the reason you might decide to meet me, I believe in meeting you where you are at, with curiosity. I truly believe in exploring the narrative woven into your life experience.
With this I imbody the mantra of “what’s happened for you?” into my practice, rather than the more widely used question of “what’s wrong with you?”.
I am here to show you that you have your own inner power to heal and get through the difficult times, you just need to reconnect with it.
I am here to listen to and witness what is happening for you and invite us to work together. To reconnect you with your inner strengths and power, so that you can take them out into your world for others to witness them also.
