Therapy

For the most part, we manage to solve most of life’s challenges by ourselves. However, certain solutions are achieved more quickly by way of professional support. Professional support can also promote deeper insight as well nurture broader nuances to one’s own life situation.

Psychotherapy is a professional and confidential platform of dialogue allowing us to process emotions, thoughts and behaviour in order to reach redemption, acceptance or change. The respectful atmosphere established in therapy promotes growth to explore new or revised solutions to be tested outside the therapy room.

The feeling of loneliness is common during challenging life periods. Likewise, there is a feeling of being overwhelmed by the thought of sharing personal matters with a stranger. Most people, however, find it relatively easy to open up. Acknowledging how common our reaction patterns are as well as how many of us share similar life experiences is one of therapeutic benefits. Other benefits include insight into environmental impacts and thereby improving the relationships with others as well as becoming more secure in ourselves and our choices. Psychotherapy, therefore, embraces problem solving as well as resource detection.

I primarily work with the psychodynamic approach which has been refined over the past 100 years since Sigmund Freud. According to this theory, humankind has been roughly defined as a product of their instincts shaped by the social environment. This view has over the years broadened acknowledging the many aspects shaping people’s lives such as temperament, attachment, relationships and environment, just to mention a few. Furthermore, neuroscience has proved the elasticity of the human mind allowing us to evolve throughout life. Therefore, the view of ourselves and our environment is also affected by sex, gender, age, ethnicity, race, culture, religion and sexual orientation, which are also called demographic identities. Therefore, the psychodynamic therapeutic work of increasing life quality often lies in better insight in our own situation to experience a greater influence over our situation as well as possibly others. Dream analysis can be used in this type of therapy. The time frame of a psychodynamic therapeutic process can be a longer or shorter term.

I also work with EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing), a psychotherapeutic method which by the World Health Organization is recognised as one of the most effective trauma treatment methods. EMDR is also a fast and effective method in the treatment of anxiety. To summarise the method briefly, a protocol is developed on the target triggering anxiety symptoms. By thinking of the target, the amygdala (alarm central) will be activated and cause anxiety symptoms. However, by guided eye movement, the target will be processed and new neural pathways evolve bypassing the amygdala and changing the negative symptoms associated with the target.