Adult Psychotherapy

The experience of speaking from the heart and being taken seriously builds the psychological architecture that supports the capacity to bear life

Psychotherapy is both a process and a relationship - somewhere and someone we can go to when life becomes difficult, overwhelming, or no longer makes sense. Although a person’s experience of psychotherapy is their own, broadly speaking, it is a collaborative exploration and understanding of ourselves, alongside a nonjudgmental other to foster change and a deeper engagement with ourselves and life. While psychotherapy can indeed require time, money, trust, and dedication, this process can lead to lasting change beyond relief from psychological distress. Overtime, you may discover a newfound capacity to navigate life’s inevitable changes, greater personal freedom and expression, as well as a confidence to occupy space within your relationships that is mutually fulfilling, without compromising your own needs.

I can assist young people and adults experiencing:

• Depression and anxiety
• Low self-esteem/chronic life dissatisfaction
• Grief and loss including non-death losses
• Relational traumas
• Relationship/family breakdown
• Helping professionals experiencing vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, and burnout
• Sexuality and gender identity concerns
• Difficulties living with chronic and serious illness
• Drug and alcohol dependence
• Difficulties knowing yourself, what you want in life, and connecting with and expressing emotion

My approach

I practice psychodynamic psychotherapy. This approach is interested in helping you gain a deeper understanding of yourself, your inner emotional world, and how earlier experiences may shape your current relationships and life more broadly. For this type of psychotherapy, change occurs by exploring the meaning of your experiences, feelings, thoughts, and behaviours that have brought you to treatment. In practice this may include examining your everyday experiences, dreams, beliefs and feelings about yourself and others, patterns of relating, or ways you protect yourself from hurt. By allowing space for your experiences to be felt and thought about in a safe and emotionally contained way, you may discover a deeper understanding of yourself and compassion for the parts of you that are in pain.

While outcomes from psychotherapy are different for every person, beyond relief from psychological distress, you may find yourself more accepting or capable of navigating the painful experiences that are typical of life; discover greater personal freedom; or no longer feel afraid to take up space in your relationships, allowing you to meet others and yourself with a new sense of wonder, play, and kindness.

Although mental health treatment is often talked about as an activity to manage, correct, or restrain painful emotions, from a psychodynamic approach, healing instead involves allowing space for these feelings to be heard, felt, and understood. This balance of developing insight and emotional expression comes from the view that symptoms may represent a deeper truth about our lives. That is, instead of focussing on immediate symptom relief, psychodynamic psychotherapy aims first to understand what is occurring in your life (in your inner and external world) that leads to psychological distress. Symptoms of depression or anxiety are therefore not considered evidence of wrongness or pathology but an experience worthy of being understood with compassion and curiosity.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is different from therapies that aim to directly change behaviours or eliminate symptoms. Instead, sustained change occurs by helping you to understand and resolve underlying difficulties that lead to symptomatic distress. For this reason, psychodynamic psychotherapy can be more long-term, requiring more frequent attendance, but typically leads to lasting change.