Individual Psychotherapy
One of the huge contributions of Humanistic Psychology is to make Psychotherapy available to anyone, so you don’t have to be mad, sick or dysfunctional in order to benefit. In fact, one of the fundamental principles of Humanistic Psychology is that everyone has room to grow, and that all of us need help at some part of our lives. For an increasing number of people the form of help they choose is psychotherapy.
All human beings learn from the moment of birth. In learning from our environment, our relationships, and our experiences we build patterns of behaviour, thought, emotional response, and belief that become habitual. These are our ways of dealing with the World, the basis of our relationships with others, and our ways of experiencing ourselves.
For many people, either because of li
fe problems, or because of a desire to know ourselves more deeply, or to grow something in ourselves, it becomes desirable to explore how we live out these patterns and how we shape our experience of our lives. Because the patterns we organise become largely automatic they happen out of consciousness. In psychotherapy, as these patterns emerge into more conscious awareness, we are able to make more explicit choices about how we want to be present in our own lives.
Getting Started
We start with an initial no-obligation session. In this session we explore what you want from therapy, what are the factors in you seeking therapy now, and usually some life history. If this session looks like a good match we would normally arrange an initial series of perhaps six sessions followed by some joint evaluation of the experience. If you choose to carry on after this point therapy would normally be open ended – that is – you carry on to the point you decide to finish, at which point we have an ending phase, the length of which would depend on the nature of the work we have done together.
