About Counselling / PsychotherapyCounselling and Psychotherapy are now established professions and originate from both humanistic and philosophical traditions that were cultivated greatly between the 1940s through to the decade of the sixties when there was an explosion of the awareness movement that fostered different approaches to self-development and growth,group and individual models and family therapy. Feminism became a motivational force in women's groups that aimed at consciousness raising and counselling became widely available for ethnic groups,company employees and for those with chronic problems such as alcohol addiction,eating disorders and drug addiction.
In 2009 contemporary approaches to mental health have divided between short-term therapy such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and open-ended psychotherapy which explores relationship dynamics in greater depth.
In the latter,the therapist facilitates an experience for the client which leads to increased insight. It is different from CBT in that there is space to explore the unconscious process over time and allow for subsequent changes as growth takes place.
Eating Disorders
For those who have eating disorders, I aim at a process that is quite gradual and builds towards a trusting relationship and alliance between therapist and client so that the client can find a consistency amongst the different internal voices and images of self. This strengthening of the inner personality eventually allows the person to feel comfortable about their emotions and decreases the need to use food for emotional reasons ie. to articulate the unspeakable or block their true feelings.
In group therapy, a person with eating disorders is able to gain a fuller and stronger self-image through engagement with the other members with whom she/he will initially gain some relief from sharing in some of their fears and ways of coping. As time goes on,it becomes easier to give and receive feedback and to feel supported, even on those occasions when in the past they would have withdrawn from healthy relationships and remained isolated.
For everybody who enters into a therapeutic relationship, the exact end result is at first unclear. The process is like peeling away at the layers of an onion and starting down a path of self-discovery.
