Gone are the days of feeling like you need to be crazy to see a ‘shrink’.
Let’s face it, we all have times when life gets on top of us. When we know there must be a better way of doing things but we’re not sure how. When family or friends just aren’t the right people to talk to. When we know we could get there ourselves eventually but realise it would be quicker and less painful with a little bit of help.
Sometimes there are terrible things that have happened or are still happening and we feel it’s time to deal with them.
No matter your reason you want to make sure you’re getting the best help you possibly can. And there are a few things about Psychology you need to know to make sure that’s what you get.
- The one big thing that stands out is that you HAVE to ‘click’ with your Psychologist (that’s me hopefully!). There’s oodles of research to say that this is THE MOST IMPORTANT part of therapy.
- The next big thing is you need to have someone who ‘gets’ you. If I don’t ‘get’ you you’re not going to give as much credit to the things I say and you’re not going to trust my judgement as much.
- And the next is that we need to have congruent goals. That means we need to be working together to reach a point that is meaningful to you.
Your first session will be your opportunity to get to know me and decide if I’m the right person for you. If I’m not it’s really important to tell me. I can help you find someone that might be more suited to you.
If you like me and want to work with me we can then tailor everything to suit you. My motto in my office is “It’s all about you” so be prepared to be the focus of all my compassion, care, and attention. I never stop believing that you are the most important person in the world whether you’re at rock bottom or CEO of the known world.
So now that more general stuff is out of the way let me give you some examples of how Heal. Grow. Transform. works.
Let’s say you want to be really successful but for some reason you just can’t seem to get promoted or make your business work. We might explore if you have a fear of failure or (just as nasty for your success) a fear of success, which would lead to self-sabotage. We might dip into Heal – where did that come from? who did/n’t believe in you? what beliefs did you develop from there? We might change those beliefs with EMDR. Once we’re all good with that we’d go into Grow where we would look at building on any skills you might need to improve: communication, time-management, emotional intelligence. Then we’d move into Transform where we’d set super exciting goals and work on the mindset to be able to follow them through.
Here’s another one:
Let’s say you’re unhappy in your relationship. We might explore your relationship patterns so that we can see what work there is to do in the Grow stage. We learn how to be in a relationship from observing our parents, the relationships we have with other family members, and the relationships we’ve had. Sometimes the templates created here don’t serve us too well and we need to learn skills that were never taught to us. If those templates included feelings of unworthiness or beliefs like “I have to keep people happy no matter what” we would need to do work in the Heal stage. Once that’s all resolved we move into Transform where you will either transform your current relationship or get yourself transformed to receive the best relationship you can.
