Individual Therapy
Deciding to enter a coaching, counseling or therapeutic relationship is big. Every one of us has survived to where we are right now. You might be prepared to tolerate more discomfort, “Suck it up” or take it out on somebody else, but prefer to live better.
Or you might be at the point of overwhelm, where you really can’t take any more. You might have come so far that you do not even know what it is you can’t take any more of. You can live better too.
Maybe your feelings or emotions aren’t the way you want them to be. Maybe you’re angry or out of control of your actions. Maybe you’re under-employed. Maybe to you, everybody is stupid or mean, inconsiderate or selfish. Maybe you think too much about something or just think too much. Or not at all! Addicted, Alcoholic, sexually confused or otherwise troubled. Promiscuous, inactive, frigid, risky. Scared, lonely, hurting. You could be experiencing some of these.
Maybe you have physical ailments that the medical world hasn’t been able to help you with. Maybe you have boundary issues, not knowing what belongs to whom. Maybe you have a yearning for more intimacy, or you seem to choose the “wrong” people to be close with.
Maybe you don’t feel understood. Or you see things other people don’t see. Or you feel things other people don’t feel. Or you just “know” or surprise yourself with psychic or energetic knowledge … or want to.
Maybe a relationship is over. With help, you can get through the pain of loss to a brighter future. You can transform a potentially scarring experience to one of personal growth. We all live in a world of relationship, and yet the only one we can really do anything about is the one we see in the mirror, our lifelong companion and the one who will certainly be there when we die.
Individual therapy can solve problems and relieve suffering directly, and importantly it can do more than that at its best. It can strengthen you to live better and more fully. You might develop resilience and maturity, balance and wisdom.
At its core, therapy with me is existential and acknowledges your personal responsibility for your life – your actions, your feelings, your thoughts, your relationships. It respects your freedom: your agency in the world that actually makes you responsible. It recognizes that you are truly in this alone, and that none of us gets out of this alive. And it honours and explores and helps to seek out your meaning and purpose in life.
“… the basic problem of life, not only of therapy, is: How to make life livable for a being whose dominant characteristic is the awareness of himself as a unique individual on the one hand, of his mortality on the other. The first gives a feeling of overwhelming importance as the very centre of the world, the other a feeling frustration and vanity, being less than a grain of sand in the universe..In Gestalt Therapy, with its emphasis on immediate awareness and involvement, we have a method for developing the necessary support functions for a self-continuing creative adjustment which is the only way of coping with the experience of dying, and therefore, of living.” Laura Perls, Living at the Boundary 2004
In therapy, whenever we talk or play, mediate or dance, laugh or cry, we’ll do it in the here and now. This reciprocity in attuned relationship can be a transformative experience, and provides the moment to sense self and other, to see what is going on, to understand our patterns of behaviour, to know ourselves and so to grasp our potential for change.
How often you come depends in part on your willingness and ability to handle the work. Most people come once a week, and we can discuss what happens with more and less frequent meetings.