My Approach

My overall goal in any therapeutic situation is to help my clients live a life that is worth living and to be an active participant in that life. Contrary to many popular beliefs this does not mean a purely happy life. A life that is filled with deep satisfaction, meaningful relationships and achievements is inevitably filled with loss, pain and failure as well. Our goal will be to accept some of these challenges, the ones that our out of our control, and make meaningful choices.

If we are able to accept the difficulties life throws at us, without worrying, obsessing, attempting to control, struggling and repeating the same unhelpful patterns we have energy and space to instead commit to actions that move our lives forward into more purposeful and hopefully satisfying directions. Two things are important when I work with any client. Firstly, that I am using evidence-based approaches that have been shown to be effective. Second that the person I am working with is a unique, creative and experiencing individual that requires a unique process crafted just for them.

I ground my work in an approach called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It is a well researched approach with proven efficacy. There are a number of resources for you to check out the evidence supporting ACT as well as understand how it works (and what you will be ‘in-for’ as a client). I have listed all the resources below which range from short youtube videos to long academic journal articles. Feel free to check these out if you are interested.

So what is the goal…

Our human instinct is to try and control our emotions and our thoughts, that instinct does not always serve us very well. Our broad goal is to increase your psychological flexibility.

Psychological flexibility is your ability to navigate and adapt to the challenges in life. These challenges can be external, such as loss, trauma, divorce, etc. or they can be internal such as anger, anxiety, obsessive thoughts, etc. More often than not we are faced with both of these things.

Become psychologically flexible means we are going to learn to be open to life’s experiences, to accept our thoughts and feelings, even the difficult ones, to be present and aware of yourself and your experiences (your mind and your heart), and lastly, to be engaged with life and to do what matters.

But how?

ACT is a very active therapy. It is focussed on making meaningful and workable change. I will do my best to understand where you are at, where you find yourself and that becomes our starting point. You and I will work together as equal partners, committed to making change.

How we do this is unique to each person, we are individuals with different lives, experiences, personalities, likes, strengths, dislikes and challenges. We are going to go through several techniques and process to identify what matters to you and look for ways to respond and do what matters. This will involve some talking and it will involve experiencing. We will do various activities and exercises to identify what you think, what you feel, what you want and decide together what to do with all of this information. This will include not only what we do each week in the therapy room (typically we meet for one session for 50mins every week) but it will include things for you to do between sessions.

But how?

Typically, we will meet once a week for 50minutes. During this time we will start by identifying goals for therapy. We will then work towards these goals. What we actually do in the session depends on each person. Generally, we will start by talking, you will explain your story, your experiences to me and direct me towards what is concerning you. Once we have set goals we will start working towards those goals. We might do this by planning new behaviours, by role playing, we may do exercises where we explore uncomfortable and difficult feelings and learn new ways to interact with those feelings. Each week we will reflect on what happened between sessions, what is working and what is not working.

ACT is focussed on workability. We are not aiming to make changes that work. That is not the same as easy. New behaviours, new ways of being are often difficult and therapy can be (and should be) hard work. It should also be supportive and feel safe. You will never be forced to do anything and we will check what feels useful to you throughout the process.

Psychological flexibility is our goal, and so the process is also flexible. We will slowly make changes and test new ways of behaving, new ways of talking to yourself and understanding yourself as we expand your experience.

I still have questions.

I have a page explaining what therapy is and how it works. Take time to explore this page and hopefully some of your questions will be answered.

My Approach

So what is the goal…

But how?

But how?

I still have questions.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy videos

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy websites

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy research evidence