PSYCHOTHERAPY
What is Psychotherapy?
Psychotherapy is the provision, by a qualified practitioner, of a formal and professional relationship within which patients/clients can profitably explore difficult, and often painful, emotions and experiences. These may include feelings of anxiety, depression, trauma, or perhaps the loss of meaning of one’s life. It is a process that seeks to help the person gain an increased capacity for choice, through which the individual becomes more autonomous and self determined. Psychotherapy may be provided for individuals or children, couples, families and in groups.
A Psychotherapist thus works with people who have emotional, behavioural, psychological or mental difficulties. The actual work is mainly to encourage the client to talk and explore their feelings, beliefs and thoughts, and, sometimes, relevant aspects of and events in their childhood and personal history. Some psychotherapists work to help the patient/client understand more about their problems and then make appropriate changes in their thinking and behaviour. As a result, the work can last over quite a long term. Brief psychotherapy is also possible, especially to help someone resolve a more immediate crisis. There are a number of different psychotherapeutic approaches: Cognitive Behavioural, Psychodynamic, Psychoanalytic, Systemic (Family & Relationship), Humanistic, Integrative, Transpersonal, Experiential, Hypno-Psychotherapy, etc.At the DaVinci Natural Health Centre we offer a variety of different psychotherapeutic approaches such as:
Psychodynamic psychotherapy
This focuses on the feelings we have about other people, especially our family and those we are close to. Treatment involves discussing past experiences and how these may have led to our present situation and also how these past experiences may be affecting our life now. The understanding gained frees the person to make choices about what happens in the future.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy may involve quite brief therapy for specific difficulties. If your problems are long-standing, treatment may mean attending regular sessions over many months.
Behavioural psychotherapy
This tries to change patterns of behaviour more directly. Patients can be helped to overcome fears by spending more and more time in the situation they fear, or by learning ways of reducing their anxiety. They may be given ‘homework’ exercises, and asked to keep diaries or to practice new skills between sessions. Behavioural psychotherapy is particularly effective for anxiety, panic, phobias, obsessive-compulsive problems and various kinds of social or sexual difficulty. Relief from symptoms often occurs quite quickly.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Like behavioural psychotherapy, it aims at changing thinking patterns directly, but like psychodynamic psychotherapy it encourages discussion of how we think and helps us to get rid of destructive ways of thinking. It does not focus very much on the past – more on the present and future and has achieved particular success in the treatment of certain types of depression.
Family and Marital Therapy
People’s problems will often not be theirs alone, but are often the result of relationship problems in a marriage, partnership or family. By focusing very clearly on the relationships involved, and by involving all the people concerned, family and marital family therapy seek to help those relationships to work better.
We also combine many of these treatments together based on the individual clients needs. One of our therapists also has a Doctorate in Clinical Sexology so is qualified to treat all types of sexual difficulties – he also works closely with couples in marital therapy.
Hellinger Family Constellations is another type of very powerful therapy that can address systemic entanglements and is implemented either in individuals or as groups.
The Da Vinci Holistic Health Centre has two psychologists as part of its team:
- Dr. George J Georgiou, a qualified Chartered Clinical Psychologist with the British Psychological Association, UK and an Associate of the British Psychological Association, UK.
- Dr. Maria Georgiou, a qualified psychotherapist and a client-centred therapist.
Contact us or book an appointment now.
