My work has always been based on the method of what is called ‘free association.  This simply means that my client is expected to start the session by saying out loud what is uppermost in his/her mind. I try to listen acutely and ‘care-fully’ to the unconscious element - or underlying content of my client’s words - that may have connections in their dynamics with relationships in their earliest years of development. In this way of speaking, listening and ‘interpreting’ the unconscious preoccupation with earliest relationships, we will gradually gain an understanding into current difficulties, damaging relationships, and a sense of ‘stuckness, which causes emotional anguish coupled, very often, with physical ailments. It is above all, a gradual journey towards getting to better know oneself, the complex person ‘within’ - discovering aspects of yourself that you have never ‘seen’ or considered or thought about before.  The work of psychotherapy creates a curiosity as to why and how a client feels stuck with repetitive feelings of suffering - and why and how the past is never a ‘foreign country.’

In many instances, Psychotherapy provides the platform on which past traumatic/painful and unbearably fearful memories can slowly and gently be allowed to be ‘remembered’ and safely ‘associated’ in the confidentiality of the space between client and therapist.  In that space, we struggle together to gain some understanding as to how past experiences, powerfully interfere with a person’s desperate desire to feel free - to ‘move on’ from the fearful and angry scars of one’s past.

I offer a consultation before starting psychotherapy with a prospective client.  It is during the consultation that I will ask for the caller to give me a detailed account of their past leading to the here-and-now of his/her life.  In this time we, together, will come to a decision and mutual agreement whether we adopt long-term or short-term work.