Specialist Men's Counselling for Domestic and Family Violence
Tough things happen in life. People who have the skills to manage themselves, including their moods and behaviours, tend to do better than those who find this difficult.
Robust mental health is maintained by being conscious about building skills and even resilience so that we can develop strategies that help us prevent mental illness. (Michael Yapko, 2020)
We all have plans or goals of some sort for our life – we just call them dreams or aspirations.
We do not always achieve our goals. Sometimes we have experiences which seem to actively get in the way of our goals. Other times we are just not well enough or have enough energy to even think about our goals.
It is a method we can use to help us understand how come we have the problem experiences we have, and what to do about them. All therapy means is we are talking to someone who has studied how people think, behave, and speak. We hope to get an knowledgeable input into how we think or behave.
Psychotherapy is a private conversation we have between ourselves and a trained therapist.
The end result of psychotherapy – is usually better mental health where we tend to worry less, make better decisions and create helpful and robust relationships with others we care about-and who care for us.
It is usually brief therapy – i.e. it lasts between 7 – 12 sessions. Research over many years shows it helps clients and makes a difference in their lives. It can be used in different situations, such as business, personal, education, child welfare, domestic violence offenders’ treatment to name but a few. It has been shown to be effective across all age ranges.
It is often a practical, goal-driven model of therapy. It involves using various interventions to enable and empower clients to identify and achieve their own clear, concise, and realistic outcomes. When psychotherapy focuses on How clients think and then act, or on the mental processes clients use to make decisions, it is called Process-oriented psychotherapy.
In order to achieve a result, or deliver our goals, we know we have to take appropriate actions.
Determining which actions are appropriate or not is the basis of decision making. When we are feeling stuck, overwhelmed, unhappy or even just angry – we tend to find it very difficult to make decisions about what to do.
Process oriented psychotherapy identifies how we create or maintain our perceptions, how we make decisions and how we action our plans. It often, but not exclusively, uses hypnosis to enhance learning new skills, change old behaviours, make more effective decisions. When we know HOW we think, then we can change WHAT we do or even say.
Process oriented psychotherapy has evolved over time. It is part of the Solution Focused Brief Therapy group of therapies. This means it is a short term, goal focused, therapeutic approach. It is evidence based.
It helps clients create their own solutions by leveraging their current skills and experiences; learning more effective processes to find and make decisions regarding the “best” solution; making better decisions and implementing them faster and easier than before.
Process oriented psychotherapy is:
Process is defined as a series of actions or steps taken to achieve a particular result…. It includes performing those actions in a particular order… Each action must add value to the next one in order to change something or preserve something.
During our lifetime, we have created our own set of actions or steps we take to achieve a result. Often we do not know what those steps are. We do not realise we think in a particular way, make decisions in a certain way, decide on a behaviour and respond to our emotions in certain ways.
Most of us are completely unaware of How we think about doing anything, How we make decisions and then How we implement them. We call this: our personal process.
As adults, we keep repeating what we always do – and then get surprised when we get the same result.
Process-oriented psychotherapy helps you to identify and where necessary change your own process. The benefit for you is you can separate your story – with all its emotions and facts – from your cognitive processes you use to maintain your story’s influence on your life.
This is how we help you to grow your robust mental health.
This is how you maintain and ensure your own continued robust mental health.
When we feel stuck, overwhelmed, or “boxed in” – we experience the “symptoms” of poor sleep, excessive or very limited eating, constantly thinking in a loop which is exhausting, anxious, to name but a few of the more common consequences of feeling overwhelmed and stuck in a problem when you cannot seem to see a solution.
When we understand and identify what we are doing to increase our awareness of our symptoms, we have a choice to make. We can choose to keep focused on the symptom, or we can choose to focus on learning what is needed to remove the symptom.
This is how we help you to gain clarity, become focused on making the relevant decisions needed for your intended outcome and choosing behaviours.
This is how you are able to see a clear way forward past your symptoms, with fewer barriers and thoughts getting in your way.
Constant physical pain is exhausting, saps your energy and makes a huge demand on your emotions.
It tends to be all consuming and leaves limited brain power to think clearly, far less make decisions and think creatively.
Pain is a physical sensation which activates nerves and the central nervous system.
Pain also creates an experience or sensations which are associated with fear, anxiety and a low capacity to cope.
Using Process oriented psychotherapy, with hypnosis, is very powerful way to learn how to reduce your fear and anxiety related to the experience of your pain.
This is how we help you gain clarity, have more focused decision making and being able to choose different behaviours.
This is how you help yourself to handle the pain more effectively, redirect your attention elsewhere and gain some relief.
Being positive is different to having positive expectations.
Positive psychology, self help programmes and books are all about finding the good in circumstances we find ourselves in, and moving our feelings to a positive space.
The expectations we hold of ourselves is a powerful force within us. These expectations which we hold – of ourselves and of others – has a significant influence on our experience.
The concept of “self-fulfilling prophecy” is where our behaviours are unconsciously aligned with our expectations – and so we repeat the behaviours and get the same results.
Having robust mental wellness, means being able to identify and reflect on our expectations so we can influence how we experience our circumstances – preferably in a positive way.
We work with you to learn new ways to reflect on your experiences in a healthy way, to decide how to build positive changes in your mind, and then behave accordingly.
This is how we help you become more positive in your outlook on your life for a long time
This is how you change your thoughts and behaviours to achieve a different positive life for yourself.
Our brain is an amazing part of us… it comes with great ability. It also comes with some built in challenges – often those which we create ourselves.
Do you know long term memories are influenced by the emotions we feel when we learn a new fact or experience a new event. They are also influenced by the emotions we feel every time we remember – or retrieve those memories.
There are different parts of the brain which “store” our different learnings and experiences. The nerves between these different parts of the brain help us to keep re-feeling and remembering what happened. The brain definitely knows which emotions dominated at the time. They continue to remind us regularly.
Process orientated psychotherapy helps you separate yourself from the intensity of the emotions and the event. It helps you think about these emotions differently and then make new decisions about how to go forward in your life.
We know your brain continues to work with you, but psychotherapy helps you to separate yourself from the intense emotions you remember with specific events in your life. In this way you gain more clarity and clear thinking.
This is how you are able to move past your emotionally laden and upsetting memories
Teaching clients is an integral part of any therapy, coaching, or counselling session.
As we live in an ever faster changing world, the skills we learnt years ago may not longer be useful or relevant. Knowing which old skills to drop and which new skills to learn is needed to build and maintain robust mental health.
Using Process oriented psychotherapy to do this, speeds up your ability to let go of older less relevant skills or processes which no longer work for you. You are able to gain new skills and processes which might serve you better in achieving the results you seek in the future.
Adults learn best through experiential learning – i.e. learning through experience, AND then reflecting on that experience and learning.
We support your learning new skills and having different experiences through teaching, coaching, activities and reflection.
You support gaining new skills and having different experiences through being open to learn, doing the new activities and reflecting on your learning and experiences.
An emotional anchor refers to a neutral stimulus which is associated with a particular state of mind.
For example – every time I see a cup of steaming coffee – I immediately feel better before I have even taken a sip. The big mug has become my emotional anchor.
Not all emotional anchors are positive. Negative anchors will tend to bring back negative emotions which cause us to ruminate and “chew” on a problem or issue.
We help you to identify your anchors which no longer serve you, thus enabling you to become more flexible and agile in your thinking.
