Julie Shannon

I have worked in the field of mental health for over thirty years and am a fully qualified and registered member of the UK Council for Psychotherapy offering Existential Psychotherapy and training workshops in the West Kent and Brighton and Hove area. Over the course of my career, I have worked across the NHS, private and third sectors with clients who are struggling with a variety of problems on both a one to one and group-work basis. My specialist areas of interest include: Relationship difficulties - Emotional abuse - Addictive behaviours - Grief and loss - Low self-confidence - Body image issues - Depression - Workplace stress and bullying - Sexual identity - Shame and fear. Existential psychotherapy strives to empower and place you and your life choices at the centre of the therapeutic process. Whilst I do include some psychodynamic, relational, schema and attachment based and cognitive behavioural approaches, I fundamentally work phenomenologically, which means that your subjective experience is of primary importance. The overall purpose of Existential psychotherapy is to allow you to explore your lived experience honestly, openly and comprehensively. Through this spontaneous, collaborative process of discovery, you are helped to gain a clearer sense of your experiences and the subjective meanings they may hold.  Fully engaging in this supportive, explorative, challenging process can help you come to terms with yourself and how you relate to others. Consequently, it can also encourage you to choose ways of being in the present and future that you identify as more deeply satisfying, meaningful and authentic.