The way I work is based on a range of interventions derived primarily from relational and attachment-based psychodynamic theory. This involves focusing on the feelings we have about other people as well as discussing past experiences and how these may have led to our present situation. However, because I believe that we are too complex to be understood by a single approach, I integrate my work with a variety of different techniques to suit each client's individual concerns. These may consist of more active modes derived from cognitive-behavioural and humanistic therapies. Possible ways of working include:
Interpretation: a classic analytic technique that can help people become clearer about the ways in which the past may be unhelpfully re-enacted in the present
Free association: an uncensored way of thinking and speaking that aims to shed light on those hidden meanings, assumptions and feelings that can seem to drive us in unhelpful ways
Dream work/Image work: a creative engagement with wishes, fears, fantasies and desires
Life-script analysis: an enquiry into the sometimes narrow and constricting roles through which people unwittingly live their lives
Experimentation: a jointly contracted endeavour to try something challenging and new both within and outside the therapeutic relationship
Focusing on bodily sensations: a way of listening to the body that aims to release, understand and integrate what people's aches, pains, excessive drinking or disordered eating might be trying to say
Focusing on the therapeutic relationship: a joint, non-judgmental reflection on the therapeutic relationship as a space where familiar relational patterns can be safely observed and better understood
