Starting therapy takes courage
Starting therapy can feel daunting if you have never done it before, as you try to imagine speaking about some of the most difficult aspects of your life or your inner world with someone you have never met before. It may be that you have never spoken about them to a soul. Often, our difficult thoughts, feelings and experiences are shrouded in shame, and this can encourage us to hide them for fear of how we may be seen. But in keeping our thoughts and feelings to ourselves, we lose out on the opportunity to have help to understand them, and help to try to address the problems they are alerting us to.
It therefore takes courage, and perhaps the recognition of needing to do things differently, that brings people to meet with a psychologist to begin with. It can then take a few sessions of speaking about your difficulties to start to understand them a little differently.
What to expect in your first few sessions
In the first few meetings with me, I am keen to understand what brings you here, how you experience yourself and those around you, and what experiences you have had that might have shaped these things. I will ask questions to help me with this, and in answering them you can begin to listen to yourself, and in doing so take another perspective. In my experience, this is one of the most helpful aspects of therapy, creating a space where you can look at things carefully and safely without any judgement or shame, with someone who is only interested in listening, to understand the way you see things and how it might be holding you back.
A rare opportunity for focused attention
The process of therapy makes the best use of the two minds in the room, to help. It is very rare in our lives that we have someone’s undivided attention, focused on us to help us. Once the process of getting to know you has got underway, it can become much clearer what our talking might need to focus on to help.
Understanding your coping mechanisms
As adults, we usually have a set of ways of managing what goes on inside us, to get us through life and keep us on track. Often we have come up with these ways when we were very young, when we went through things that challenged us and we might have had to manage without the right help. Often these ways of coping have got us through tough times, but sometimes we reach a point in our lives where they don’t seem to be as effective.
Exploring repetitive patterns
Perhaps they are outdated, in that they now cost us more than they help us? They might push people away? They might convince us that we can’t manage any other way, that we cannot bear emotional pain? By looking at these things, we can develop a compassionate understanding of how we have got here and the confidence that we can learn other ways that will make such a difference. We understand the repetitive thoughts, relationship patterns, and recurrent feelings that dominate your mind and might be getting in the way of a better life.
Working together to understand You
We sit, and we talk about you. We talk about the story that you bring about yourself and the experiences you have had.I bring my psychological knowledge and clinical experience, and we see how it fits for you, what you can take away that is helpful. We come to understand what makes you tick, how your mind sees things, prioritizes things, ignores or minimizes other things.
A transformative journey
I have worked with hundreds of people over the 19 years that I’ve been a Clinical Psychologist. It is one of the privileges of my life to have witnessed so many people feel their lives transformed by the process of careful attention to their emotional pain.
I have come to appreciate that our emotional pain is actually our lifeline – a signal to us that something that is very important is very wrong. The gift of therapy is that we can do something about it.