My style of psychotherapy is based on the human givens approach.
This derives from the understanding that, when essential emotional needs are met and our innate mental resources are used correctly, a human being will be emotionally and mentally healthy. Essential psychological needs, which have been identified over decades of work by health and social psychologists include needs for autonomy, sense of control, security, connection, attention, achievement, status and meaning. Innate resources have been much studied by neuroscientists, and include our abilities to learn from experience, plan, assess, imagine, relate one thing to another, empathise, develop a moral sense, remember, and generally survive on this planet.
It is when emotional needs are not adequately met, or are met in unhealthy ways, or when innate resources are damaged for any reason, or are unintentionally misused, that undesirable mental states such as anxiety, anger, depression, addiction, lack of self-confidence and psychosis develop. For instance, misuse of the imagination – to conjure up worst possible or threatening scenarios – is a common feature of all these states.
I use a variety of approaches, drawn from tried and tested therapeutic strategies such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), interpersonal therapy, solution focused goal-setting, motivational interviewing, mentoring and neuro-linguistics (NLP) as well as the latest neuroscientific findings, and new insights derived from the HG approach which increase our knowledge of what it means to be human and our understanding of what people need to maintain emotional wellbeing.
This is a practical, forward-focused approach, which avoids concentrating on, and being stuck in, what went wrong in the past.
We would be focusing on positive actions and mastery of skills and understandings that people can use right away and in the future, to move on in their lives and make a real shift.