What is Body Psychotherapy
We all have a body. We all have physical health and mental health. Each affects the other. When we feel well in the body, we often feel clear in the mind. When we have aches and tension in the body, it can affect our mood. Everything we think, feel, do and believe has an effect on us.
Our bodies are communicating with us all the time
Our bodies communicate with us through our breath, skin, muscles, gut feelings, internal senses (pain, subtle and gross movements and sensations), external senses (sound and vision, smell, touch and taste). We can experience great joy and pleasure in the body. It can also be a seat of deep tension and stress.
Connecting with how we live, move and have our being in the body
We often have highly developed minds. In body psychotherapy, we bring awareness to our often excessive levels of thinking and invite the body in more consciously to the exploration: we are looking for balance, looking for a good connection between the two, becoming aware of our 'body-mind', no longer separating parts of ourselves off, but allowing all the parts to come together to feel fully alive.
In a session, I am interested in your connection with your own body
I am listening to what you are telling me and why you have come to therapy. I am also listening to and noticing your body and what it is telling me, or not telling me, about your story.
We can experience our bodies as a place of comfort, safety, refuge and cosiness. When we are stressed or frightened, our bodies can feel like an unsafe place to be. Sometimes people want to get away from their bodies, get out of them; they want to stop the feelings that are coming up. Perhaps they don’t know how to look after or soothe their bodies when distress comes. What is your experience of being and having a body?
Some people think they need to be good at talking to come for therapy or for therapy to work at all. This is not true. You can come as you are. We can find a way to connect.
Many of the answers lie within us. Therapy helps us to tune out the unhelpful voices and frustrations we have with ourselves and tune into a calm place of deep knowing, where we can say, “That feels right; yes, that makes sense.“ Profound and simple changes can occur when we come back to ourselves; when we reconnect with our own wisdom and knowing.
Short-term counselling can help you in a crisis. You become stable and learn resources for the present and immediate future, so that you can cope again and your life can become more manageable going forward.
Psychotherapy has a different approach to short term counselling. It generally aims to deepen thoughts and feelings within you. It supports you to open up to yourself, your immediate friends and family and, more generally, to life. It can lead to a greater sense of ease within yourself and ease with others and the wider world.
I offer these types of therapy and support:
- Short-term counselling
- Psychotherapy
- Body Psychotherapy
- Integrative
- Relational
- Psychodynamic
- EMDR
- Trauma Therapy
- Systemic and Internal Family Systems (IFS)
- CBT Techniques
- Mindfulness Techniques
- Clinical Supervision
Group Work
I offer large group taster workshops on Improving Performance and Managing Performance Anxiety.
Together with Performance Psychologist Dr Kate Gee I offer ongoing group workshops on Managing Perfectionism and Performance Anxiety.
