Psychotherapy helps people in three main ways: through exploration processes, through insight processes and through action processes. How these processes are combined generally depends on the complexity of the problem you are facing.

Most psychotherapy treatments begin with some exploration of the problem you are facing in your life (though sometimes people can move quickly, even directly, to action).  During exploration I listen carefully to you—to what you say but also how you say it—to learn more about how you experience things. At the same time, you learn more about your experience too because my curiosity is an invitation for you to become more curious about yourself. As the psychiatrist Jerome Frank once asked—‘How can I know what I think until I have heard what I have to say?’ Exploration is about giving you a chance to listen to what you have to say.

This work of exploration that we undertake together might be enough for you to solve the problem you have come to me with—sometimes, though, more is needed. In these cases, we extend the work of exploration: as exploration develops, it deepens, and becomes insight. Insight helps us develop awareness of problems that the earlier work of exploration was not able to uncover or make sense of. Developing insight can feel like seeing—and feeling!—a problem from a very different perspective, or of penetrating obscure parts of your experience and illuminating them.

Once we develop insight, we often need to take action to make enduring change in our lives. The fact is that merely developing insight into why we feel or think or behave the way we do is often not enough to change the way we feel or think or behave because the force of habit keeps us stuck in established patterns. Taking deliberate, manageable steps to change your life is what we work together to achieve in the action stage.

And therapy with me doesn’t end when our session ends because I support and encourage you to undertake activities outside of our sessions that will extend the work of exploration, insight-building and action-taking that we complete in session. I aim to foster your independence, not to trick you into spending unnecessary years of your life in therapy.