Psychotherapy is counselling process guided by psychological theory, in order to facilitate growth. This can be as a preventative measure, as a treatment or management effort, or to enhance ongoing personal development. Each individual makes their own decision as to how much of each element is involved in their process.

Psychotherapeutic theory is an enormous field of study, with a huge variety of approaches, including broad categories of philosophical, existential, psychodynamic, cognitive-behaviour and humanistic therapies. Every therapist is faced with the difficult task of selecting a number of therapeutic approaches, and achieving a sufficient level of mastery to effectively tune those approaches towards conducting effective therapy. While therapists of the past would often train and practice exclusively in one school of thought, most modern psychologists employ an integrative approach to therapy. This involves combining elements of various types of psychotherapy in a theoretically sound and practically manageable manner, in order to achieve the best possible outcome with each individual client.

My integrative approach is informed by a combination of four well-respected schools of thought:
 

• Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, the original cognitive behavioural therapy. This approach combines cognitive and behavioural techniques with a sound philosophical theoretical background to achieve noticeable behavioural changes and lasting improvements to cognitive and emotional functioning.

 

• Psychodynamic therapy, as founded by Sigmund Freud and further developed by a number of well-respected therapists (for example, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott). This approach focuses on the individual's past as a precursor to present-day problems, and follows the assumption that linking these aspects of individual history to unconscious thinking processes allows the individual to work past developmental blockages, and achieve their full potential.

 

• Gestalt therapy, a present-focused therapy working on the assumption that the whole is greater than its parts. Fritz and Laura Perls developed an approach which focuses almost exclusively on the present moment, and the individual's thoughts and feelings as they occur at the moment they are queried. Their approach includes experimental features very similar to those employed by cognitive behavioural therapies, and aims to allow the individual to work through what is happening in the immediate present to achieve self-actualization.

 

• Imago therapy, a couple's therapy approach based on psychodynamic principles. This modality explores the wounds of every individual's past, and how their partners can help them to heal these hurt aspects of self, and in so doing heal themselves through their relationship.