(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 first overarching Practice guide explains and summarises the therapeutically and theoretically based philosophy, and scientifically evidenced model, on which we base our clinical work. The CCRTT practice model of Relationship and Trauma therapy.
Other Practice Guides give greater depth to various aspects of our way of working with different groups and subjects:
Practice Guide 1
PSYCHOTHERAPY EXPLAINED – WHAT EXACTLY IS IT? HOW DOES IT WORK? IS THERE ANY EVIDENCE? WHAT CAN I EXPECT? GUIDE
Contents:
- Introduction – what does Psychotherapy mean?
- Your life in relationship
- The role of relationship and trauma in shaping our minds
- Why early life matters
- The brains interpretation of experience
- Psychotherapy with CCRTT: what we do and why it works
- How Psychotherapy creates change
- Why understanding leads to choice
Psychotherapy is about much more than talking about problems. At The Cheltenham Centre for Relationship and Trauma Therapy we seek to understand how early life experiences shape present emotional patterns, relationships and wellbeing. This Practice Guide explains our approach and how psychotherapy helps people create lasting change.
Introduction
In a sense the term Psychotherapy and its’ meaning is a ‘does what it says on the tin’ word: if we think of the medical interpretation of ‘Psycho’ as ‘mind’ (from the Greek ‘Psyche’) then Psychotherapy is a ‘Therapy of the Mind’. For it is in our mind that our mental health, for better or for worse, exists.
This CPractice guide introduces a theory of the mind and the development of emotional difficulties and their implications to our behaviours and quality of life, possibly the reasons why you are reading this now.
We have a very clear therapeutically and theoretically based philosophy, and scientifically evidenced model, on which we base our clinical work. The CCRTT practice model of Relationship and Trauma therapy.
In the guide we go on to explain what the therapy is, what you can expect from therapy and the therapeutic relationship and how it facilitates your healing. We introduce our different areas of working: with individuals, couples and online.
Your life in relationship
CCRTT was founded and exists on the simple premise that we live in a world of relationship with ourselves, with family, with others and with our natural environment.
We come to exist first in relationship with our primary carers from conception. We are shaped in our early life relationships with primary carers, our extended family and others as we develop through childhood. We arrive in our fully developed adulthood shaped more, or less, successfully from the totality of our developmental relational experiences.
Our quality of life is shaped through these experiences: the way in which we perceive others and our beliefs about how they perceive us. Crucial elements of our personality such as trust, our view of ourselves, our belief in beneficial outcomes or the reverse are born out of our relational experiences.
These beliefs can leave us in adulthood with anxiety, fear, hopeless depression and many other difficulties that can blight our lives and our ability to be the person we were made to be. CCRTT exists to transform lives blighted by these symptoms.
We exist and work successfully with our clients so that they and you can make the most of the rest of your lives fully confident in your own self, able to feel safe and secure in yourself in relationship with others.
The role of relationship and trauma in shaping our minds
Our ability to lead fulfilled lives in relationship with others as adults is implied to a significant degree by our early life relationship experiences from conception, to birth, infancy, early life and into adolescence.
Our ability to feel safe and secure in the myriad world of adult relationships is directly related to the quality of relationship we experienced in early life; this is explained in depth in our Foundation Clinical Guide. This is when our understanding of our world, our place in the world and of the worlds view of us is shaped.
Why early life matters
When we are born (in fact from when we are conceived) think of yourself as a dry sponge. The only emotion we know is fear and drives us to seek nourishment: physical and emotional.
Our primitive ‘fight or flight’ brain (the limbic system) exists to keep us safe and is present from birth. The rest of the brain is simply longing to soak up experience and it does at the rate of one million neuron connections/second.
Our more sophisticated brain where processing and understanding of experience takes place does not come fully on line until adolescence (hence the turbulence of adolescence as our brain finally attempts to make sense of who we are).
For the majority of us our primary carers and principle relational experiences leave us feeling safe and secure in our world, confident in our own worth and our ability to believe in others and to form fulfilling relationships.
You may well be reading this however because you do not feel like this; perhaps you do feel anxious most of the time, perhaps you feel you have no worth or may be you feel without hope and helpless.
These feelings can arise where in early life our emotional needs, principally derived from fear were not met or perhaps we encountered neglect in other forms. The real difficulty is that where an early life does not receive the response of love, comfort and warmth the brain decides that the world is consistently unsafe; the binary world of the infant further concludes that there must be something wrong with ‘me’ because otherwise someone would meet those needs, and so the foundations of an intrinsic sense of worthlessness are laid.
The brains interpretation of experience
The infant brain encounters unmet needs as a trauma because the underdeveloped mind is not able to process experience in a way that can create any interpretation other treat and safety, fear and comfort; this whole subject is covered in greater depth in our Foundation Clinical Guide. The memory becomes stored unprocessed as a belief in the brain and remains the experience that shapes not purely the infants world view but also the developing life into adulthood.
This in turn becomes shaped by our various strategies that we adopt to keep ourselves feeling safe. We can become more withdrawn in our lack of worth; we can feel so easily threatened that we attack back in all sorts of ways; we may resort to substances and addictions.
The original experience of trauma lies lurking in our primitive brain shaping our experience and unconscious assumptions of ourselves in the world.
CCRTT exists to shine a light into the experiences, make the unknown known and enable you to make the most of the rest of your life by resolving these beliefs and their implications to your quality of life.
Psychotherapy with CCRTT: what we do and why it works.
The principle theoretical model that we work from, in summary, is that early life trauma and neglect shape trust, attachment, emotional patterns and adult relationships. These early life experiences and patterns shape our unhelpful feelings and behaviours as adults.
You may well be reading this now having come to a point where your life is simply not tolerable, you don’t understand why, you become overwhelmed with feelings that do not seem to relate to the present moment and you really need some help to make things better but without knowing how.
How Psychotherapy creates change
Our core role in helping you to understand and to resolve your pain is to make the unknown, known. In making known what currently lies in the unconscious as assumptions we journey with you to correct your unhelpful distressing interpretations of the present that are informed by these assumptions.
What is happening in your mind that creates such difficulties in adulthood is that your infant experiences lie in your unconscious memory as a convicted belief. The real problem is that this convicted belief lies outside your conscious awareness but nonetheless shapes your brains interpretation of the present.
The only information our brain has about our present are the experiences and conclusions that it can draw from the past. In essence, we can only be in this moment an accumulation of all our past moments of experience. Where those early developmental experiences were unhelpful life effectively compounds that experience as we continuously cope with all the subsequent unhelpful conclusions that we draw about who we are in this world and how the world is to us.
Why understanding leads to choice
In the therapy the influence of our past is unravelled and explored so that the unhelpful patterns and assumptions can be processed. In processing we can notice the influence of our past in ambushing our present: in making this known we are in a position to make an alternative choice that is based on present reality. This process is underpinned by the evidence of neuroscience which tells us that in giving our minds a consistently different experience our neural pathways will change, a process known as neuroplasticity.
Whether working with an individual, a couple or neurodivergent clients we are all simply the product of the totality of our split seconds of experiential existence. In therapy with each client(s) we create an understanding of these hitherto unconscious patterns. Patterns which may have led us to feel we weren’t able to be in control of our lives, to be who we wanted to be and to have a fulfilled life as the person we were truly born to be.
In awareness of these past patterns we create choice: the choice to understand our pasts, to notice those patterns and to choose to take a different and more authentic choice in the present.
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:
