What is Psychotherapy?
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Psychotherapy is often known as a "talking therapy". There are many disciplines of psychotherapy - psychodynamic, person-centred, integrative, gestalt, etc. Generally speaking, psychotherapy is the process of exploration into unconscious issues, negative feelings and behaviours experienced by an individual assisted by a trained, qualified and registered therapist. These issues and symptoms may include feelings of depression, anxiety, sadness, anger, trauma or the general loss of meaning to one’s life. Exploring psychological or emotional issues and helping one look objectively at behaviours, thoughts, feelings and problematic situations stimulates cognitive, conscious understanding for the client and thus the client increases their capacity for choice, bringing autonomy back to their life.
Aristotle is quoted as saying "Knowing yourself is the beginning of all Wisdom". Psychotherapy and counselling is the process by which you begin to understand yourself and connect with your inner wisdom. |
Why use psychotherapy?
Sometimes when we experience negative emotions there’s an obvious, logical explanation for them. Sometimes, however, our emotions, behaviours, perceptions or thoughts seem illogical or irrational, causing us pain or disturbance. Our behaviours might be automatic, seemingly out of our control. The less consciously aware we are of the motivations behind such negative feelings, thoughts and behaviours, the more they seem to control us and we feel “stuck”. Psychotherapy helps an individual understand unconscious conditioning, beliefs and motivations, bringing the underlying, unconscious cause of the symptom to the attention of the conscious, rational mind. From this understanding it is possible to recondition and change attitudes, thoughts and behaviours.
Sometimes our emotional reaction to life seems to overwhelm us, even when we know the cause of that pain. Various avenues of psychotherapy can assist us in navigating life and our problems. The psychotherapeutic tools used by Angela in her therapy work are: Eye-movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing (EMDR Therapy), Hypnotherapy, NLP, Transactional Analysis, Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Emotion-Focused Therapy for individuals, Emotionally-Focused Therapy for couples and Mindfulness.
Sometimes when we experience negative emotions there’s an obvious, logical explanation for them. Sometimes, however, our emotions, behaviours, perceptions or thoughts seem illogical or irrational, causing us pain or disturbance. Our behaviours might be automatic, seemingly out of our control. The less consciously aware we are of the motivations behind such negative feelings, thoughts and behaviours, the more they seem to control us and we feel “stuck”. Psychotherapy helps an individual understand unconscious conditioning, beliefs and motivations, bringing the underlying, unconscious cause of the symptom to the attention of the conscious, rational mind. From this understanding it is possible to recondition and change attitudes, thoughts and behaviours.
Sometimes our emotional reaction to life seems to overwhelm us, even when we know the cause of that pain. Various avenues of psychotherapy can assist us in navigating life and our problems. The psychotherapeutic tools used by Angela in her therapy work are: Eye-movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing (EMDR Therapy), Hypnotherapy, NLP, Transactional Analysis, Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Emotion-Focused Therapy for individuals, Emotionally-Focused Therapy for couples and Mindfulness.
