Helen Rowland - Skipton Counselling and Psychotherapy

When I google ‘counselling and psychotherapy’ in Harrogate I get approximately 72,000 results. How on earth do I find the right therapist for me?

This is a question I am asked on a regular basis. When people ring to make an enquiry about psychotherapy or counselling, they are trying to make a decision about whether or not I am the right therapist for them. They are usually trying to make this decision via email or over the telephone in a very short space of time and with very little information about me, how I practice or knowing what they really want to get from visiting a therapist.

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Tags: General, help
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I had never heard of Professor Theodore Zeldin until yesterday, when I heard him interviewed on the radio about his latest project. A Feast of Conversation is a fascinating concept: strangers gather together and are provided with a menu of conversational topics. And they simply talk to each other for three or four hours, just for the pleasure of sharing another’s mind and another’s world. It’s like the antidote to speed-dating.

Professor Zeldin is promoting the kinds of conversation where we might ‘discover what it is like to be someone else, and what other people feel’. He has captured quite beautifully our innate desire to engage with the other meaningfully at an intersubjective level.

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Tags: Intersubjectivity
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Don’t we all have one: the internal voice that judges our actions and behaviours against a moral compass to keep us on the right path? Or do you also have a more persecutory and pernicious version that tells you that you are stupid or talentless or embarrassing or a big head or ugly or unloveable or…….? (You may add your own particular self-punishment here!)

When people come to therapy they eventually get to the point where they acknowledge their internal self-loathing, as this is the aspect of self that has driven them to therapy in the first place. Sometimes they hear the voice. Sometimes it is a little more hidden.

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Posted in Psychotherapy, Structures of the self | No Comments »