Our integrative approach is tailored to meet the individual rather than applying one specific therapy approach to every individual. It involves integrating different approaches to best suit the client including Psychodynamic, CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), Hakomi, Existential, EMDR and Gestalt”.
Therapy can help people to a greater or lesser extent depending on many individual factors. Available support, emotional readiness for change which includes finding both the right therapist for you and the right therapy approach for where you are at.
Our Psychotherapy Services Include
Psychotherapy is a process of work and effort that involves exploration, experimentation that leads to insight and understanding which forms a foundation for positive change and growth. The process is a co-creation which relies on a committed working therapeutic relationship evolving between therapist and client. The benefits of psychotherapy can provide you with the opportunity to explore areas of your life which may be causing you pain, confusion, anxiety, depression or panic. It can provide you with insights into what might be hindering you from creating and maintaining meaningful, supportive and nourishing relationships. The Humanistic and Integrative psychotherapy approach puts emphasis on and respects the persons are self-regulating, self-actualising and self-transcendent beings, ultimately responsible for their self.
Just like going to the gym to exercise your body and become physically fitter, therapy involves exercising your mind and requires commitment, effort and determination. Like a gym, the more you put in the more you will get the benefits for yourself. Counselling and Psychotherapy are offered on a one to one basis. Counselling is short term, focusing on client’s current difficulties and sessions tend to be one a week for fifty minutes. Psychotherapy is for those who wish to understand their current distress through a deeper investigation over a longer journey.
Successful counselling and psychotherapy is a co-created process between a willing client and a supportive therapist. The process is the clients, the answers are the clients, the therapist’s role is to facilitate, to help support, enable and resource the client where they are at.
Issues We Help With
Humans can be very resistant to change and yet change is inevitable and always taking place. The process of Therapy can provide support to reach understanding and clarity in dealing with change in terms of developing self-empowerment to make change or in addressing resistance and rejection of change.
Relationships can be complex involve others and yet and individual. All relationships have deep connections conscious and unconsciously to our unique relationship with our self. We meet all other and the world through this core connection.
The process and journey Psychotherapy allows for exploration, understanding which can lead to understanding around RELATIONSHIP, BELONGING, INTIMACY, SHAME, LONELINESS and provide insights into connections to our sense of self, our self-esteem and our levels of COMPASSION, GRATITUDE
Starting from an understanding of individual responsibility the most essential relationship is the relationship you have with yourself and this is reflected in all relationship with others.
Relationships are essential to being human. There is no such thing as perfection. Relationships are subject to change, to pressure, to neglect, to breakdown. Couples may experience breakdown in communications, times of anger, mistrust and conflict.
Breakdowns proved the potential for Breakthroughs.
Therapy can provide a supportive holding space for real communication and meaningful contact to become unstuck and bring new clarity.
Belonging starts with self-acceptance. Your level of belonging can never be greater than your own level of self-acceptance.
Believing you are enough is what gives you the courage to be authentic, vulnerable and imperfect.
Humanities perfection lies in the heart of its imperfection.
Every one person is individual, unique and thus special and yet we each have so more in common with every other human on the planet than we share in differences.
True belonging only happens when we embrace our authentic imperfect when we present our authentic imperfect selves to the world.
Our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.
Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage are not always comfortable but they are never weakness.
Healthy striving is self-focused – How can I improve?
Perfectionism is other focused – What will they think?
Intimacy can be understood as stripping away your outer, more public ways of being and sharing your inner life with another. Taking off your mask, your role and showing your true self, true feelings, fears, loves, joys, pains. It relies on honesty, truth and self-awareness.
We are born in relationship; we are wounded in relationship and we can be healed in relationship.
Our relationship to our self-determines our capacities for relationship with all others.
An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices or betrays our core self and each of its many segments that make the whole expresses strength, vulnerability and weakness in a balanced way.
An intimate relationship is a living organ, nurturing, challenging, dynamic safe and contained.
Nurture, love, care, forgiveness, compassion support relationship, relationship to self in terms of who you are and relationship to other in terms of what you bring.
Intimacy involves courage and compassion to know our self authentically and fearlessly show that truth to another person.
Love provides the scaffolding to support such intimacy.
We cannot experience life in its fullness unless we have an intimate relationship with another human and beyond that a feeling of connection to the world around us.
Contact and relationship with the other is the very soul of humanity and stems from the contact and relationship you have with yourself. Love and intimacy is the greatest gift we can give our self and the greatest gift we can give and receive from another. To feel it, to share it we must know it in our self. Our capacity to share it will be directly related to how much we manifest in our self.
Shame is the key to the unfolding of the self.
Shame is in the source of most of the disturbing and devious states that deny you living a full and balanced emotional life. Shame is a powerful, toxic, paralyzing, negative emotion with the capacity to destroy your inner world and paralyze your emotional intelligence
It is beyond guilt, beyond anger, beyond hate manifesting in a lethal self-hate, rejection of self that can only be tolerated and balanced by deep feelings of possession and no self-worth. It suffocates and dominates manipulating your truth, your reality, poisoning your connections to your very core self.
Blame says I did something wrong.
Shame says I am something wrong.
Shame lives and supports a worthless self.
Shame runs on empty, provides the ultimate target and resting for all wrongs, frustration, angers hurts your Self. Shame is a last resort of coping survival mechanism, the ultimate judgement court of last resort which disempowers self-disconnects destroys connection to self.
Shame provides a function and a support structure when no other is available or accessible.
When we can’t cope, can’t defend ourselves, shame permits us to withdraw to find one perpetuating solution that there must be something wrong with you that you are the cause, the problem and the blame. Beyond guilt and remorse, beyond justice or reason it is judge and jury and a death sentence to your Self finding the blame, lies in a worthless self.
Shame sacrifices your Self and your freedom, it is the ultimate stuck self. Your truths and your realities are overpowered. Shame is addictive and serves as an addiction. Shame provides a solution, provides you with a universal answer and ready available accessible identifiable target – Your Self.
Shame is devious, manipulative and dysfunctional, operating at conscious and unconscious levels. Shame destroys self-esteem.
It represents a last desperate mode of functioning, coping, holding it all together when all else has abandoned you and manipulates you to be dependent on shame, to hold it so tightly that you struggle to give up your shame, fight hard to hold on to it, rely on shame to cope and unconsciously seek it out in all your connections.
The invisible innocent Cobra like Snake of Shame wraps itself around you, choking your emotions, strangling your core self while shooting poisonous venom into your heart and mind.
And it graciously donates you its venom and poison, its hate, blame, guilt, anger as your own and leaves you shaming and blaming your Self for poisoning yourself and mirroring what a low life, worthless, shell you are to poison yourself.
Links between Loneliness and Intimacy run deep. Loneliness can reflect the parts of self that we are not in touch with or cut off from. Loneliness has been referred to as the hole in the soul, something missing, separate. Loneliness can be an escape, a hiding place, a place of refuge – Connection is the opposite to loneliness.
We might feel it, know something is missing but cannot verbalise, cognitive, rationalise yet deep down we feel it.
When we lose connection to our self, which is what we bring to others we lose our humanity.
Loneliness directly connects to our relationship with our self.
You can be in a crowd and steel feel lonely.
Do you consider yourself good company for yourself?
In Depression, something in you being depressed, pressed down, denied.
This takes a lot of energy and can be draining, unsustainable and take over as a dominant coping mechanism.
Depression is a natural response to loss of hope, to pain, to frustration, to loneliness.
It can reflect any disconnection to our emotions or a defence to cope with what seems as over powering, known yet unknown.
Compassion is not pity and to pity is not compassion. You can only be as compassionate to another as you are compassionate to yourself. Compassion directly relates to empathy.
Gratitude is among the most powerful feelings, with huge healing capacities.
It is inherent in receiving as much as it is inherent in giving.
To be grateful for who and what you are, to be grateful for your experiences, to be grateful for what you have. To take gratitude from every experience.
The practice of gratitude is simple but not easy. It must be rooted in truth and reality, free of ego.
It weaves between Givers and Takers holding a thread between appreciation and entitlement.
You can find it much easier to give than to receive.
Gratitude is in the here and now and represents a true mindfulness state.
Psychotherapy can deliver insight, assist in understanding, addressing what is behind the impacting expression, suppression, underneath the presenting symptoms, the coping modes leading to an opportunity for the client to work towards living in a more satisfying and resourceful way.
At OMC, we work with a wide variety of presenting issues within a safe secure boundaried therapeutic relationship. Our initial assessment procedures are structured to ensure a holistic informed individual therapy approach including liaising directly with your other engaged health professionals, including your existing medical team as is appropriate in the best interests of your self-care. The reality is issues may overlap, be related to each other. There may be more than one explanation. The starting point is developing insight and understanding. Before you can reach any destination, you must know your starting point, your current location, develop understanding of how you got there towards insight and understanding, resourcing, to move in the direction you seek.
Abuse takes many forms. It may be physical, sexual, controlling, financial, emotional neglect. It may be carried from the past or ongoing. It may be with you constantly or it may be buried deep in your unconscious but still impacting you. Psychotherapy can provide the holding, resourcing, support to heal abuse, to overcome abuse and to no longer be a prisoner of your past. Shame, lack of self-esteem, lack of confidence, anxiety, addictions can be related to and arise from abuse suffered. Sometimes self-blame, self-shame is the only logical way of coping and carrying on due to the over powering impact and injustice of the wounds suffered.
Addictions are as complex as they are individual and express themselves in alcohol, dependency, gambling, eating disorders and drug misuse – whether prescribed or street drugs. Addictions take many forms, some more damaging than others – it’s individual and it’s all relative to each person’s story and history. It might include relationships, shopping, exercise or sexual activity, porn, chat rooms, it might include food issues, eating disorders. Humanistic Psychotherapy views the person as more than addiction. Addiction is what you choose to do, it can be the way you chose to cope, it is never who you are. We view addiction as an expression of symptoms, a coping mechanism. Therapy involves exploring the choice of addiction, origins of an addiction exploring how the addiction serves the individual essentially in terms of benefits as well as the consequences. Understanding, compassion, truth expanding into new ways of resourcing, emotional upskilling forms an essential part of this work.
The teenage years are among the toughest and most challenging in the life cycle. No longer viewed as a child and still regarded by society as less than an adult – it’s common for teenagers to get stuck, overwhelmed and struggle. Therapy provides an essential, safe and confidential space for the teenager to talk and be listened to without judgement. Through a special and unique listening relationship with your therapist, it becomes possible to reveal, express and understand problems, issues, challenges beyond labels and scripts, to explore emotions, unconscious drives. Psychotherapy can provide the essential support and facilitate new understanding for resolution, change, growth.
Anxiety increases with denial. The starting point is self-honesty as to what you are feeling.
The unknown breathes anxiety. You ask yourself are you anxious? where and do you feel it, how do you know when you are anxious. What are your triggers?
Do you know what makes you anxious – is it momentarily or regular or constant?
Can you identify what is making you anxious right now? Anxiety impacts mind and body in terms of physical and psychological symptoms. These can range from palpitations, shortness of breath to panic attacks to mental stresses, including sleep loss, sleep-apnea.
Dysfunctional and destabilising anxiety originates from the past or in the future and serves to deny, rob you of your present, it disables you.
Focusing your Anxiety in the here and now in your present moment is a key technique to managing.
Present moment is right now, what is happening right now, what is relevant to your situation right now and when you catch this, you break the unconscious pattern, you regain your power and control.
Anxiety is a coping mechanism, it is a survival function – it can be healthy and serve you, sometimes telling you to avoid, to be on your guard or to just run. It becomes dysfunctional when it dominates and is a regular pattern rather than a safety mechanism.
It becomes unhealthy when it dominates and it controls you rather than it being a useful sense that you are in control of.
It can originate in unresolved trauma. It can originate from previous experiences or earlier life.
Its source can be unconscious to your mind yet with your nervous system running on auto pilot activation. You can self-medicate anxiety but chances are your anxiety will return along with any negative side effect of self-medicating which you may find further disempowers you and leaves you feeling more anxious.
Mindfulness and Meditation training and resourcing as part of your therapy approach can lead to better coping skills and management of stress and anxiety. Structured resourcing, guidance, practise in therapy sessions over time can result in learning to be in the here and now, to live in the present moment. Sometimes our mind is like a runaway train – can be preoccupied with issues past or concerns for our future and can cause the loss of our present.
Depression is very real, can be both painful and destabilizing. It can be interconnected in your mind and body, impacting your present, your future, while rooted to your past. It may relate to suppression in terms of holding something down or an outright rejection. It may relate to withdrawal. It may be a side effect of connection to other events. There is no label or one size fits all, it is a very individual experience that requires individual understanding and approach.
Depression can be an opportunity for growth where you can get insight and understanding of the core source of your depression. Each Individuals experience and journey is different as is the road of overcoming or learning to manage depressions ability to seriously undermine the quality of your life experience. It can have connections and overlaps with diet, sleep loss and addictions. Depression is not who you are, you are always more than a label. It can take you over and cause disconnection from your core self and the wider world. Depression can be connected to repression and unresolved events, unprocessed emotions from the past. It can relate to loss, grief, abandonment, loneliness, and inability to cope. It can have its source in illness, many symptoms. It may have overlaps and interconnections with other difficulties ranging from sleep, diet, energy, illness to addictions. It may be a message from the mind that it is overloaded, it can’t cope or demands change or it won’t function. It may be the minds way of slowing down, withdrawing. It may be a warning bell. There may be biological, physical illness, brain chemical issues involved either at source or as a bi-product. Co-ordinated Supports and new resourcing are essential to treating depression including liaising with your existing medical team and your GP as part of a co-ordinated individual, tailored, holistic approach for your best self-care.
Research suggests eating disorders are about a form of control. Deep unresolved, emotional issues, far from what seems obvious, may lay behind such control. Eating disorders are complex and tricky, commonly linked to intelligence, self-esteem issues, perfection seeking. They include overeating and being significantly overweight. Despite common aspects no two cases are the same. Each individual case has its own unique emotional history and circumstances and therefore requires an individual understanding and treatment plan.
Psychotherapy can provide an opportunity to examine our current life meaning and purpose, to reconcile and understand where we are right now, how we arrived. From such an understanding a supported platform can be created to move towards balancing where we find ourselves and where we would like to be, including clarifying out goals for the future. Psychotherapy can provide support and assistance for you to develop your understanding skills and resilience to move towards your goals.
Issues such as self-harming and suicidal ideations can be directly connected to self-esteem, loss of purpose and motivations. OMC therapy approach is informed by Safe talks and CAMS (collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality) approaches.
Dealing with loss and grief is a process and an individual journey that can be supported with psychotherapy. The stages and journeys are individual. Some fall apart and some cannot mourn, or even cry. Sadness for loss, anger for loss. Denial and eventual grieving for loss are all stages in the healing process. Each individual finds their own path, their own means of coping. Part of the healing process is honouring your own process and psychotherapy can provide you with holding and support to help you on your journey.
Issues worked with include male and female sexual dysfunctions, performance anxiety, intimacy, expectations, guilt, fantasies, fetishes, porn issues. Psychotherapy explores underlying emotional connections that impact sexuality. Psychosexual therapy can provide help where there is no biological explanation or resource available and / or in conjunction, in support of a medical related condition as part of a co-ordinated team approach.
In times of great stress, self-harm is a desperate attempt to cope and alleviate an internal build-up of pressure. In essence, it is a coping mechanism. Self-harming is not an isolated event. It has a lot in common with addictions – eating disorders for example. It is a dysfunctional communication reflecting inner turmoil. Psychotherapy invites and assists in resourcing the client to explore, gain insight to the underlying issues to enable and empower the individual to speak the anxiety rather than write it on the body.
We live in a stressed world. We cope as best we can. Sometimes a sudden circumstance, experience, life event can cause our stress levels to no longer be manageable leading to deeper difficulties. We suddenly find our longstanding coping mechanisms no longer work for us or are creating even more stressful consequences. This loss of coping can then undermine our sense of self-worth and confidence and create further difficulties including greater levels of stress and anxiety undermining our abilities to cope even further.
Traumas can range from childhood events to sudden life events. Sudden loss, life threatening experiences can lead to an inability to process in mind and body leading to trauma becoming trapped and ever present. Past trauma can be stored away dormant for many years suddenly triggers by a life event that may not be obvious. Trauma can be hidden, disguised under symptoms or expressions of dysfunction. Psychotherapy involves firstly safety and resourcing to avoid re-traumatisation’s. Trauma impacts both mind and body to degrees. Trauma can express itself in mental breakdown and / or physical breakdowns. As it impacts mind, body and soul it requires an individual treatment and recovery plan that works with holistic integrated healing involving mind, body and spirit.
