(Where a word or phrase is underlined, you can follow the link to another Practice or Clinical Guide for a fuller explanation of that topic. Feel free to follow them as your questions arise—they're designed to help you build a fuller understanding at your own pace.)
This guide forms part of our Practice Guide to Psychotherapy, which explains the principles that underpin our work with individuals, couples and families at Practice Guide 1.
Practice Guide 2
Working With Individuals
Introduction
People often seek help by searching for a Psychotherapist, Counsellor or Therapist because they recognise recurring emotional or relationship patterns but cannot understand why these continue despite their best efforts to change.
In Psychotherapy the therapist seeks to help the client to unravel past experiences (many of which may not be capable of being brought to mind). Those experiences are then processed; experiences which were not capable of being processed by the child of the adult.
In doing this work we encourage the adult to imagine not what their adult mind makes of their story but how the infant would have experienced the patterns and behaviours. This can be profoundly moving.
In this processing a choice is created. The choice between continuing with old patterns or to view the present through a different lens and respond differently, accurately and beneficially. There is an inexorable relationship between feelings and behaviour: if the feelings don’t belong in the present then neither can our behaviour accurately respond to the present; this is explained in greater detail in our Foundation Clinical guide here.
The work in practice – how we meet in the therapy space
The therapist has many roles during a therapy. Perhaps one of the most important is known as ‘holding’ in which the therapist helps the client during a process which at times, especially perhaps on first entering and those first few sessions, feels exposing. You may feel vulnerable; uncertain; how much (or how little) should I say.
Feeling safe in Therapy
It is certainly a therapeutic truth that the safer we feel the more able we may feel to talk about the experiences that bring us to therapy. These experiences are often rooted in early life; experiences that may often contain great shame. The therapists most important primary role is to facilitate a space where there is a relationship of great depth. Where you can feel heard, received and metaphorically held; where there is no judgement; where there is compassion and empathy.
We understand at CCRTT that generally our clients may never have spoken about what it is that brings them to therapy; may never have spoken about what may be excruciating and exposing experiences; may be speaking out of experiences where you may never have been heard, where you may have been ridiculed or neglected; where you may have suffered abuse whether emotional, sexual, physical or relational neglect; where undermining and shouting may have been common place.
We are passionate about helping you to process these experiences at the right time, with the right timing, at the right pace where you feel safe enough to allow someone, the therapist, to see every part of you and in a space of unfathomable compassion to walk with you on your journey to healing.
The nature of the work
While the therapists role is to facilitate the relationship that enables change, the therapeutic time and space belongs to the client. The therapist respects the client and the pace that you may want to explore your inner world that may have been always outside your awareness, that may be a frightening part of you.
Understanding rather than blame
There will come a time where you feel comfortable about speaking of those things that may have been too terrible to talk about before; it may be that there was a pattern of which you were completely unaware. Clients will often worry that Therapy is all about blaming parents, especially mothers. This is not the way we work. We look for understanding and explanation, not blame and shame.
At CCRTT the basis of our approach to every human being is that we are a collection of different behaviours: thousand and thousands of different responses to different circumstances. Some of those behaviours will have been unhelpful and some may have been uplifting. We will all have suffered, to some degree or another, unhelpful behaviours towards us that will have shaped who we become.
The therapeutic space
In the therapy we seek to uncover those unhelpful elements of our experience and explore how this encounter may have come to shape us; this is discussed in greater depth in our Foundation Clinical guide here. Bringing our darker, known as shadow, selves into the therapeutic light. In this light we can fully process those experiences and in doing so create a choice to change and an understanding of what we would like to change;
The therapeutic space then adopts an additional holding role as you live your life in a different way: taking the risk of change, deciding to make sense of every experience in the present moment ‘in awareness’.
Rather than being driven by feelings and behaviours that you simply did not understand and may even have felt unable to control, you will meet every circumstance with a changed perspective: one that reflects who you really believe you are and want to be: your true self. The therapeutic space is then also one in which you review your different way of being.
The process of change
This is not easy work as our minds also hate change. In fact as you make different, albeit better, choices the mind may perceive those different choices as a threat to the familiar, albeit unhelpful pattern.
Doing what is better for us may itself be perceived by our mind as a threat to the status quo that our neural connections are used to. Feelings of anxiety may even increase, feelings from a release of Cortisol, but in fact that is a good thing, but hard therapeutic work.
There is a sense as you go through this process of our conscious awareness helping us to notice those responses that reflect a past assumption rather than making a present interpretation. We become more astute at noticing, challenging and dismissing those inaccurate responses and making different and better choices.
Living change beyond the therapy room
A part of the process is also to overtly and consciously notice and endorse yourself when you survive what would otherwise have been an old unhelpful pattern; also to be able to accept that this is hard work and sometimes we will fall into old traps and patterns: to be able to be compassionate, understanding and acceptant of ourselves as we travel on the journey.
The therapeutic relationship and space are there to return to, and to process, these conscious experiences in the present as you encounter the ups and downs of the therapeutic journey.
The therapist will be with you through all this to journeys end. The science now tells us what therapists have already experienced and known: the therapy helps prune old neural connections (old assumptions) and lays down new ones: the ones that reflect who you were truly born to be: the science of Neuroplasticity.
We have a depth of clinical experience working successfully with clients in their world as they journey towards the person they were truly born to be: fulfilled and able to be at peace with themselves in their world.
If you are looking for an experienced therapist or counsellor in Cheltenham, or would like to explore online psychotherapy anywhere in the UK, please get in touch here or see our details below.
Related Practice Guides
To see how these principles are applied in our Practice please see the relevant guide below:
