“If you don’t make the time on creating the life you want, you’re eventually going to be forced to spend a LOT of time on dealing with a life you DON’T want…”
Kevin Ngo
People can turn to therapy for a number of reasons. Some may want to focus on specific problems they are currently struggling with; others want to overcome their sense of life as a deja-vu – of finding themselves over and over again in much the same place of repeating problems that cycle in familiar and destructive patterns. Others yet may turn to therapy when they find themselves in the unfortunate, but yet not uncommon situation of life simply being too unbearable to be faced alone… And then again, the drive for therapy can not necessarily be rooted in the need to overcome a particular difficulty or clinical presentation, but rather in the human aspiration for growth, increased EQ and advanced general resilience.
I can offer my help in all those different scenarios. What brings you into therapy will influence the type and duration of therapy that is best for you. You may want therapy for a few sessions to help you through a specific and difficult time; or you may wish to to work longer term on the deep-seated and long-standing difficulties, in order to overcome the ways in which your past (or indeed your present) is currently casting its’ shadow on your desired future.
In this section you can find more detailed information about my areas of interests and expertise, the specific difficulties that I can help with and the type of services and support that I do NOT offer, as well as the type of resilience and Growth-oriented work I can help with (existential life-work).
I can help with the following types of presenting difficulties & psychological distresses:
Depression, overwhelming feeling of Sadness or of general lifelessness…
“Ours is a culture so consumed with the relentless pursuit of happiness, its secrets and its science, that it layers over the already uncomfortable state of unhappiness a stigma of humiliation and shame. But unhappiness can have its own dignity and can illuminate who we are as much as, if not more than, happiness.”
Maria Popova
In our society today two completely opposing things seem to co-exist and even grow, in parallel to one another: our society’s obsession with happiness… and our society’s ever increasing levels of depression. The latter will hardly come as a surprise to anyone and is relentlessly captured in the incessant growth of prescription of anti-depressants worldwide. Most people are so focused on all the secondary feelings associated with them “not being happy” – shame, sense of failure, sense of being a burden to the others, as they are not a constant jolly-face, etc. – that they struggle to seek support for how they are feeling, often not even thinking a different way of feeling is even possible for them.
Although both these states of feeling (sadness and depression) are incredibly difficult, they do hold a lot of really valuable and important information that actually holds the key to our future happiness. They pose with cruel intensity some valuable questions, relating to our happiness: “what is it that is deeply hurting and saddening to me?”; “what is missing from my life, so that I am happy living it?”, “what changes do I need to make in it, so that it becomes worth-living for me?”. Through its’ merciless pain depression often tries to help us understand what most deeply matters to us – it teaches us about our values, about what we can and can not make compromises with and what indeed are the most important things for us. This internal voice of ours is too important and holds too much power in it, to merely be left unaddressed or to simply throw the blanket of an anti-depressant on top to soften the sensation down, without giving that internal pain a space to be heard and understood.
Psychotherapy can not only help ease the suffering, but it can also help us stop feeling so stuck, heal, make sense and process all this difficult, negative feelings; grief as we often must, and then start building a new map of our lives – more focused on our true feelings, needs & desires. This in itself will inevitably make our lives more desirable to us.
Healing the body
Relationship issues or issues with intimacy – individual work
The psychotherapeutic support I can offer in this area can increase one’s own capacity for building & sustaining healthy relationships; better managing existing relationships & avoiding cyclical reactions, as well as increase ability to break free from unhelpful patterns of repetitive behavior & negative life-choices in relationships. Examples of areas for such individual work are the following:
Relationship issues or issues with intimacy – working with couples or families
Trauma, injury, loss, bereavement
“Time exists in order that it doesn’t happen all at once… space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”
Sontag
And yet, despite this law of physics, which separates time and space, many people may go through periods in life when they feel like both of these are crushing down on them at the same time, causing them to ask themselves the eternal question, which inevitably comes to our minds whenever we try to make sense of suffering – “Why me? Why this? Why now?” Generally speaking, anyone who finds themselves amidst a turbulent life-storm, an existential crisis or a major life-circumstance, that begs this question to be asked, will most probably benefit from psychotherapeutic support…
What do we mean by trauma here and therefore, who can find this type of work helpful: In our lives and even more so – in our minds – many things can constitute trauma. Examples can be an accident, an attack, a heavy operation, a miscarriage, but also a really painful divorce (one’s own or that of one’s parents); a traumatic life-event such as a heavy betrayal, etc. Basically, trauma can really be any event that directly or indirectly has threatened our physical or psychological survival, and as such has scared us, and left us with the lingering feeling that we have not yet fully overcome it or have repaired from it…
What do we mean by loss here and therefore, who can find this type of work helpful: In our lives, unfortunately, we all shall go through our inevitable share of losses. We can lose many things – a child or a loved one, but there is also loss that is less embodied, but still very real nonetheless… We can lose our job, our dreams, our imaginary futures and lives we built all our hopes for (e.g., when faced with inability to have children when wanting to; inability to find a partner to start a family with; losing the future we always dreamed of, etc.), losing our status or identity, (e.g., after we retire or following some other life-circumstance, such as, and often equally, so after bankruptcy OR successful buy-out, etc.) Occasionally, we can also even lose our very selves…
Therapy can prove a very effective tool not only in reducing the huge amount of suffering that inevitably accompanies such circumstances, but also can help reduce the amount of internal scaring, sense of loneliness and hopelessness, and crucially – help keep the necessary balance between despair and faith, which will inevitably allow for new beginnings to emerge with time.
For those who want to find their answer to the existential question “WHO AM I“? (And then go and ask themselves “Who CAN I truly be?“)
“It is not so easy to become what one is, to rediscover one’s deepest measure.”
Albert Camus
As humans we need to be able to discover our own selves, to help build ourselves up, make choices, create dreams and set ourselves goals and encourage ourselves to follow them, and all that – with the knowledge that we are impermanent. We need to aim to have a sense of who we are, at our core, and preserve continuity of Self and of our life story, while still making room for life constantly changing and never remaining the same. That’s a pretty hard task to achieve, if left purely on our own instincts and with no real support, awareness or form of guidance…
Who do you want to be? What do you want the outcome of your life to be? How do you REALLY want your life story to continue? Unless we find the answers to that we risk living a story someone else wrote for us…
For those critical moments in life, that force us to ask ourselves the question “Why me? Why this? Why now?”
Generally speaking, anyone who finds themselves amidst a turbulent life-storm, an existential crisis or a major life-circumstance, that begs this question to be asked, will most probably benefit from psychotherapeutic support… Sometimes life can throw too big a curve-ball at us, it can push us to the wall and challenge us to our very limit and simply gets too unbearable to be faced alone… And it needn’t be – having gone through a loss, an extremely frightening or traumatic experience, needing to face a life-threatening or life-altering health diagnosis in oneself or one’s family, are all examples of circumstances when having someone to sit with us in our pain, confusion and fear and to keep steady amidst all the storms can make life just that bit more bearable, less frightening and less alone, to help us meet the challenge and overcome it successfully.
For more information about possible circumstances and difficulties, in which I can help with, see “Trauma, injury, bereavement, loss“.
“New beginnings are often disguised as old endings”
Lao Tzu
For those seeking to learn the art of living a happy life; for the curious & busy mind and for the normal human suffering that comes through living…
What constitutes true living? What separates living from merely passing through the passage of time, from existence? When do we truly feel alive?
We must reach at least some degree of harmony with ourselves, our choices and with our loved ones, if we desire to achieve a life worth living. In addition to that, as humans we are all born with an internal need or even hunger for a sense of meaning, but yet we find ourselves thrown in a world which refuses to readily provide a clear one leaving it solely up to us to create one for ourselves! Finding our own sense of meaning can give us a huge sense of purpose to this journey, a real flow of energy and a sense of aliveness and therapy can offer us invaluable help in our search for it.
What type of Psychotherapeutic support I DO NOT offer & falls outside of my professional scope of work
Part of the responsibility and the ethics of every professional, especially one in the medical field, is knowing one’s own area of expertise and one’s limitations. Therefore, I must also state my professional boundaries of clinical training & remit of expertise and outline what kind of presenting difficulties I DO NOT work with: