Why Therapy? What can it do for you?

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Explore and understand your goals, values, hopes and fears to gain insight into your relationship with yourself and others. Become clearer about your personal and professional identities and how to deepen and enrich them. Find out how this self-understanding can change your attitude, increase your self-confidence and regulate behaviours. Become aware of the hidden conflicts in yourself - conflicts which cause symptoms that reduce your energy levels and your engagement in productive, creative activities. Confront and grapple with the paradox that there is not enough of you AND there is more to you than you realise.

Learn about the nature, origin and consequences of self-doubt, negative thinking and self-defeating behaviours that stop you looking after yourself. Learn how to combine self-compassion with self-criticism. Understand how your over-sensitivity to negative emotions affects your thinking generally and your ability to reflect on those feelings. Clarify your goals and the strategies best used to reach them. Understand, regulate or eliminate your use of addictive or recreational substances that provide short-term pleasures, but restrict your psychological growth, reduce your achievement potential, and adversely impact your physical well being. Take yourself on as a life-long project with due attention to all areas of your self development, self-expression and self-actualisation. 

Get to know who you are, by finding out what you feel - and what you cannot allow yourself to feel. Understand how negative emotions affect your sense of self, decrease your motivation, and sustain patterns of thinking that impair your enjoyment of daily life. Learn to recognise your feelings before they become too difficult to think about. Open up the possibility of having access to the full spectrum of feelings, so that you can use them in the further pursuit of self understanding, awareness of your uniqueness, and of feeling fully alive. 

Discover the way your thinking distorts your perception of self and others. Learn how thinking and feelings interact so that both create confusion, disorientation and defensive strategies for coping. Recognise the difference between thinking and worrying, between imagination and fantasy. Increase your ability to think creatively and critically, with self-awareness and positivity as key features. Develop your capacity for self-reflection, self-analysis and self-appraisal. Extend your powers of concentration by holding a value on being able to think clearly, critically, logically, creatively. 

Find out what you are really like in relationships, what you want (and need) from others, as well as what you think they want from you. Recognise patterns of conflict in and across thoughts, feelings and behaviours that affect your expectations and disappointments. Understand the real meaning of empathy so that you can use it appropriately and effectively in relationships. Learn about your patterns of dependency and withdrawal, your style of attachments and your ability to cope with separations and loss. Understand what makes relationships last and why some fail to get going. Set appropriate goals in your relationships to maximise meaning and pleasure. Learn to know the difference between people who want the best for you and those who have little concern or interest in your failure or success. 

Understand the differences and links between 'work' and 'play'. Become aware of how each is affected by your psychological well being, and how your psychological health allows you to engage in both with enthusiasm and pleasure. Learn how both play and work rely on the coherence and stability of a sense of self. Understand fully how your capacities for work and creativity determine your personal growth and your personal/workplace relationships.   Increase your focus and concentration when working and how to 'lose' and renew yourself through a full participation in the wide cultural realm.

Understand how and why past relationships and behaviours get repeated in the present and how these repetitions can seriously affect your well being in the future. Recover lost connections with meaningful aspects of the past by working on them in order to use them in the present. Disarm the tyranny of regrets over losses and missed opportunities. Face the future with courage and optimism, equipped to deal with real challenges and adventures - not fake ones. Set yourself up with determination, resilience and openness for new encounters and projects. 

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