Psychotherapy
Imaginal Therapist
Panic & Anxiety
The overwhelming demands of life and relationships can leave us feeling tremendously anxious. When the world seems to close in on us and we are faced with the everything, our bodies can hardly manage all the incoming energies and we feel it as panic. Differentiating between what is demanding our attention and what we can let go of can be helpful to calm down what can feel like a runaway fire. Working with the body closely and feeling its responses in different environments and conditions can open a new way of understanding what its responding to and how it can be treated.
Depression
Care for the soul requires an appreciation for the many moods that it presents to us. Faced with seasons of depression, we might ask ourselves what it's doing here, what does it want from me? Some feelings and thoughts seem to emerge only in these darker moods. If we suppress the mood we also suppress the ideas and reflections the depression may be asking us to look at and attend to. Times of sadness and melancholy could be necessary retreats from the world and familiar expectations of life. Because of its heaviness and painful emptiness, it is often tempting to look for a way out of depression, suicidal thoughts may appear, it's a time that feels void of ideas with nothing to hang onto. If we could allow ourselves to turn towards what its showing us deep within ourselves we may foster a deep care and value for these insights.
James Hillman writes: "Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind".
Relationships
Every exchange in life is a relationship; what do we offer in and what do we take?
Love and attachment writes Thomas Moore can breed such painful feelings of melancholy, jealousy, fear of separation, a special kind of loneliness, heartache, disillusionment, loss of affection, rage, insecurity, loss of identity and a sense of being smothered.
How do we navigate these often highly volatile stages, when issues need to be addressed, boundaries set, projections recognised so that they can be withdrawn and bonds either deepened or loosened. This is the stuff of life, and understanding and deepening our relationships only seems to be possible when we have grasped a more intimate and complex understanding of our own natures, projections and shadows.
Couples Therapy
In a committed relationship, we find a concentration of emotions and resentments that if unmediated can lead to unneccesary pain. Marriage seems to bring out not only all that feels inferior within us, it also lays claim to and makes enormous demands on our spouse or partner.
Language between two emotional, mysteriously individual people, understanding what was said and what was heard is perhaps the challenge of couples therapy. A slow witnessing and gentle repetition can lead to a more clarified understanding of the person who at times feels so alien to us with insights into the more complex and perverse patterns we enact.
The painful work of dealing with betrayal, abandonment, separation, loss of trust and even a sense of alienation within a marriage or partnership can be dealt with in a safe container where each person can reveal what their needs and fears are.
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Loss,Trauma & Illness
Thomas Moore writes: "Although we treat illness as a problem to be solved, it is one of the great mysteries of life. During illness, the soul comes out of hiding and shows itself in fresh realisations and new priorities. The experience of illness shifts our relationships, thoughts and feelings, life changes radically. Both the sick person and their loved ones go through a disorientation. We deal with issues of life and death, and discover the importance of love and caring from friends, family and from skilled strangers.
When you have lost someone close to you, being comforted can feel impossible as your world feels ruptured and that emptiness of the loss ensues and your body aches. We can feel frightened, cut off and out of control. It helps to understand that illness, loss and grief is an experience of the soul as well as a body in distress. In William Blakes language, the body is the soul".
How does it need to be tended to needs to be felt and lived into.
Addictive Behaviour
One way of looking at addictions of all kinds signal that a life is stuck or blocked. Jung has written that every form of addiction is "problematic" whether it's alcohol, drugs, sex or idealisation in that it keeps us wanting more without actually getting what we feel so sure its offering. How to look more deeply into the objects of our desires and the longing that it accompanies.
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Hillman takes this further and suggests that we could say the addiction is a symptom; "What’s important in an addiction is the value of the substance, the value of something external to me, on which I depend totally. It’s this that the addiction recognises: there is something outside of me with which I must be in touch with. Whether it involves co-dependency with a person or addiction to a substance, the result is the same: my psyche can’t live without this other. The author Eric Hoffer said: You can never get enough of what you don’t really want. You don’t really want the alcohol. If you can find out what you really want, if you can find your true desire, then you’ve got the answer to your addiction.