Individual Psychotherapy
I believe that no one needs therapy more than therapists. We can only take our patients as far as we have been willing to go ourselves. Therapy for therapists is not about pathology, it’s about self-exploration and growth. It’s about maturation. When does emotional growth end? When are we fully emotionally mature? Therapy for therapists is about having dedicated time put aside each week to speak, to reflect, to deepen into our internal experience and to encounter our unconscious, which is not something we ever graduate from. It is sometimes painful and sometimes quite fun… truly.
It can transform your life.
Supervision
I offer supervision to therapists who are willing to commit to either weekly or fortnightly sessions.
It takes time, emotional engagement and a strong commitment to build an internal frame that our patients can challenge, push against, rely on and settle into in order to feel safer within the therapy relationship.
I believe that supervision is not just about receiving support or advice. It’s about our own personal and professional growth. I am a strong advocate for therapists being engaged in a lifelong process of supervision. An external frame can crumble under pressure without our own sturdy internal frame. We don’t build an internal frame overnight and we don’t build one without our own long-term therapy. I believe that without an internal frame, our patients and their therapy is at risk. With a sturdy internal frame, real and long-lasting change can happen.
Relationships are not stagnant or things we can grasp or know with absolute certainty. They are fluid and forever changing. They are connected to our feelings, not only our intellectual capacity. Our patient’s symptoms and maturational needs will find a way to push up against our own maturational limits and un-worked-through parts. This is often painful and results in intense countertransference feelings. These need attention and when we attend to these, things can change both for our patients and for us, and we get true satisfaction from our work. Satisfaction in our work and our ongoing growth act as protection against burnout. It keeps us alive to our work and our patients and it’s why we got into the job all those years ago.
Training Groups
I lead Training Groups for therapists. A Training Group is a Process Group for professionals. It is a space to explore and encounter your feelings and relational dynamics. You will learn what feelings and thoughts you have about others and how they think and feel about you. In a training group, you learn how to think into feelings, and feel into thoughts. It is a space to mature and develop your professional identity. It is intense. It is at times painful and of course at times can be a lot of fun. It is a place to develop and to be known by your peers. It is intimate. It is vulnerable, and therefore takes a great deal of courage.
Reading Groups
A reading group is a place to continue your intellectual growth. It’s a place for those who love to read and love to learn. It’s for a group of therapists who have a stack of books they have all good intentions of reading, but need the dedicated time and commitment to actually slowly work through each book chapter by chapter. It’s a place to bring theory into conversation and a relational process. In short, to bring theory to life. As the facilitator I will help you understand the theory and take you further into how it links with and/or differs from other psychoanalytic thinkers, writers and theorists. Psychoanalysis is opaque, and not easily grasped or digested. I am here to help you wade in and digest the material.