Is this right for me?
My approach:
Therapy tailored to you through the integration of different techniques and tools
There are two ingredients to successful therapy - firstly, understanding yourself - your thoughts, your motivations and your patterns of responding to situations and events; and, secondly, knowing how to change these and thus your ways of responding to your environment.
Some types of therapy, such as person-centred and psychodynamic, mostly rely on the first mechanism to help clients - that is, they focus on figuring out what is going on internally for the client, without addressing much of how to go about and achieve tangible change. They assume that insight alone will spur on and give enough knowledge to the client on how to implement the needed changes.
Other types of therapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy or therapeutic coaching, focus on the change process as a means to achieve the client's therapeutic goals. They assume that even without a clear understanding of the underlying pattern, the changes that the client implements can resolve the internal conflicts.
The truth is that understanding the issue will not always lead to its resolution, and implementing change might not work long-term if there is lack of understanding of the underlying problem. Therefore, both approaches on their own are essential, but also lacking - that is, unless we combine them into an integrated therapy. In my practice, I do precisely that - I work integratively, so that we can help you achieve a good understanding of your inner processes as well as figure out a blueprint of how to implement tangible change.
If you are looking to improve your wellbeing & understand yourself better, you want the space to explore matters in depth, and you want to see tangible changes in your life, integrative therapy is right for you.
What are the different therapies and what is therapeutic coaching?
Counselling - giving you space and exploring matters in depth (internal domain)
Counselling is about helping you explore and understand your internal processes and gain deeper insight & understanding of yourself and your interactions with the world around you. This is a space for you to bring whatever you want to our therapy sessions and explore it in depth, guilt and judgement-free. This way you can understand how your experiences have shaped you, can spot patterns in your life and your responses, and create a narrative that helps you explain to yourself the world and your behaviour. This is helpful for alleviating distress, improving wellbeing and coming to terms with yourself (1). There are different schools of counselling - or modalities - but by and large, they aim to address the internal processes and improve insight and understanding.
Therapeutic Coaching and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (external domain)
Therapeutic coaching and cognitive behavioural therapy focus directly on how to change your behaviour, your environment or your response patterns. This can be essential to therapeutic change. You might have good self-insight and understanding of yourself, and still struggle to change certain unhelpful or maladaptive response patterns. This is so because the aetiology of a problem does not necessarily bear relevance to the solution. For example, someone who became depressed as a result of neglectful parenting (aetiology), now has internalised a belief that they are unlovable (maintenance); and understanding the cause would not necessarily change the internalised belief.
Personal consultancy - integration of therapy and therapeutic coaching (internal and external domains)
Personal consultancy is a type of innovative integrative therapy, which fosters a client's understanding of themselves and their patterns, whilst also addressing directly issues around how to change (more about the Personal Consultancy Framework here). It combines different therapeutic modalities with coaching tools. This integration allows for a more holistic approach by looking at the internal and external factors that contribute to a problem. It also allows more flexibility due to its wide toolkit and atheoretical stance, whilst still offering the insight-boosting benefits of traditional counselling.
