My Approach
The hallmark of any good therapy is the therapeutic relationship. This is just a fancier way of checking in with how comfortable and confident you feel with your therapist. Do you feel heard? Do you feel like you're working on what needs to be worked on? Do you feel your therapist has your best interests in mind? If the answer to these questions is yes, you're already well on your way. Without this in place, not much is going to change. When you come to counselling, you want to talk to a genuine human being, not a robot implementing a technique. It's important for me to bring my authentic self in to the room with you.
Of course, therapy is more than this. The therapeutic relationship is necessary, but not sufficient. This is why I draw from a number of approaches to help you work towards achieving your goals. Therapy involves learning more about yourself, developing tools and skills to do things in a different way, and fostering your compassion and curiosity towards the different aspects of yourself. Through this compassion, release of painful experiences can be realized.
Skill building and insight
Once a therapeutic alliance starts to develop, the first phase of therapy can begin. This is the skill building and insight phase. During this phase, you will learn more about the factors in your life that contribute to your challenges, identify self-defeating thoughts and identify patterns in your behaviour that keep you stuck. Next you will develop tools to shift these habitual thinking and behavioural patterns. I use Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to help you with this phase.
Emotional Processing
The next phase of therapy involves deeper emotional processing. You may have had experiences in the past where you can think your way out of something, but on an emotional level, that belief remains the same. This is where emotional processing therapies come in to play, that allow you to access the parts of yourself that are still holding on to these emotional beliefs. Through this processing, these beliefs can be shifted on an even deeper level. The modality which I draw from to facilitate this process is Internal Family Systems therapy. Click on the button below to learn more.
