Empowering Change with RK Psychotherapy

The introductory session

The first session is most often an opportunity for the client to get a lot of stuff out, to express a whole load of things that they have not had chance to express fully and without fear of consequence. I try to see and hear you as fully as I can, I try to begin to understand what has happened to you and how it has felt and feels now to be you.

Some clients may take a long time to get where they need to get to, and that is okay, you can take as much space and time as you need. Some things do not need to be told, some places can be left, if there are some places you cannot go, then you do not have to go there.

This process happens again, and again throughout the therapy, but in the first sessions it is at its most person-centred, its most led-by-you. As we proceed, I will become more active in adding my expertise and experience to help you find a pathway forward that will be effective for you precisely because it is uniquely constructed around who you are and what you have experienced.

Following Sessions

My practice is constantly evolving as I seek to understand more deeply what works and why and apply that within the unique context that each of my clients brings to sessions with them.

I use an integrative approach that unfolds in the structure of each session. Each session generally has three elements interwoven throughout. The first is what is happening in your present, what you have experienced, felt and thought since the last session. Second is your childhood and family and how the dynamics of growing up affect adult personality and relate to your experiences in the present and as an adult in general. Third are your inner personality dynamics understood either through Jungian dream analysis and/or through a deep shared exploration of your feelings and emotions.

The theoretical background to these techniques are Person-Centred Counselling, Jungian depth psychology (dream interpretation), the Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment Theory as developed by Patricia Crittenden and techniques for the treatment of complex trauma, particularly mentalization and emotional processing techniques.

I use all of these, all of the time, they compliment and feed into one another, but the balance will vary according to the particular needs of each client and the point at which the therapy is at.

This is the core of what I do, but it is not all of it, I also work with loss and grief and I work with spirituality and existential questions. I also work with the misuse of power, the threats that people feel as a consequence of such misuse and the meanings they attached to that and how this is related to mental distress.

Working with People of Faith and No Faith

I am happy to work with people of faith and people of no faith. I work with atheist scientists, and I also work with practising Muslims and Christians. I respect all my clients and their understandings of the world. I seek to learn what I can from my clients as well as to offer what I have of value to them. I have a lifelong and pluralistic interest in spiritual and religious traditions. I am happy to discuss issues of spirituality as part of the process of therapy, but I will never seek to undermine a client’s faith.

The Advantages of Dream Work 

Dream work brings to therapy a power that few other approaches can come close to. At its best dream work ensures that therapy stays true to the authenticity of the client, and because of that can have a transformative power with profound and life changing consequences. Dreams can do this because they are so uniquely related to your interior, the final arbiter of any interpretation is your gut feeling and they can bring an astonishing inner wisdom that reveals resources that you did not know you had and which apply specifically to the issues you are facing right now. 

Dreams typically bring together the past, the present and your interior personality dynamics and presents the relationships between them as a symbolic narrative. I help translate those narratives, locate the resources revealed in them that are part of you but hidden in your unconscious, and make them available for you to use. These resources are in fact the parts of self that repeatedly hi-jack your intentions when they are out of awareness, but by bringing them into consciousness they become tools under your control. For example suppressed anger can become much needed assertiveness, the drawing of boundaries and self-care. Suppressed selfishness that periodically bursts out as frustrated uncontrollable rage can become the choice to feel carefree joy without reason. These things are not easy to do, but the rewards are very great, a little access to these resources can keep you the right side of the line and stop you falling but a lot of access to them can profoundly change your life and bring greater depth and meaning to everything you do and feel.

There is more to dreams than this. Another key role they play is to help us find that part of ourselves that needed care, that needed comfort, but that did not get it, maybe we were shamed, or bullied, or ignored, and having found that part, to give to him or her now what they did not get then, be it compassion, care, understanding, explanation, you and I both, and by doing so together to soothe them enough to be able to let them into the light of awareness also, and by doing that for you to become more whole and complete, more balanced and autonomous, and to find more value and meaning in yourself, others and life.

This is big stuff. It is not just about getting back on the bus, it is about finding meaning in life that is deeply rooted in both the personal self and the common experience of humanity. As Carl Jung said “The least of things with meaning is worth more than the greatest of things without meaning”. A little deeply rooted meaning can go a long long way, in fact it can last a lifetime.

This is both the theory, it is my experience of my clients, and most of all it is my experience of myself.

Dream work is not necessary

We can work with dreams from childhood, we can work with fragments of dreams, with single sentences. And we can work with no dreams at all. If we get the therapeutic relationship right, there is nothing else we need, and I have done some of my best work with few or no dreams. Everyone is different, or as Jung said - we need a new theory for every client.

How I use attachment theory 

Attachment theory is not what most people think it is. 

Attachment theory is about how family dynamics in childhood affect adult personality. It’s also relevant when people have suffered loss and it’s one of the chief ways of describing and understanding the development of complex trauma. 

Attachment theory explains how certain biases in using and understanding emotions, ideas of (self-)blame, responsibility, autonomy and personal effectiveness in relationships emerge from unconscious childhood strategies adaptively developed to stay psychologically intact, to ‘feel ok’ and not be overwhelmed. These are evolutionary survival strategies that are bio-psycho-social in nature. They are natural and adaptive, but they can stay with us long after they have outlived their usefulness and become, instead an obstacle or a burden when once they were a life saver.

Thinking in these terms helps to quickly make sense of a whole load of confusing emotions and behaviours that took place back in the childhood family, that now are somehow reflected years later in the inner conflicts and personality dynamics of the client.

This gives sense of meaning and a line of clear connection, it gives targets for emotional exploration and processing so that experiences that belongs in the past can finally be left in the past or entirely new meanings found to replace old ones that no longer fit your reality, and when all of that aligns with the dream interpretations of depth psychology, things start to click together, and some sort of clear path forward that is meaningful, practical and uniquely yours will start to emerge.

Finally, my own experience of actively applying these very techniques to myself, can help you bring all of this mind-work down to feet-on-the-ground, moving and speaking and thinking differently, feeling differently, feeling better, feeling more meaning and more purpose, and at the same time, finding relief from old wounds.