My Approach
I work with you collaboratively in a therapeutic relationship on which you can depend. My job is to listen, understand and remember, helping you to make connections you might not otherwise make. I facilitate your insight around patterns and behaviours that may be outside conscious awareness and that may cause difficulties. I help you to know yourself better and to help you achieve a better relationship with yourself and others. Where there is trauma, I support you to relegate it to past tense, so you can enjoy a better quality of life in the present and future. Our therapeutic relationship is high-stakes and life-affirming. It is a catalyst for change.
About Me
I am a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, member of The Guild of Psychotherapists and fully accredited by UKCP. I abide by the Ethical Codes of Practice of both The Guild of Psychotherapists and of UKCP.
I am British Anglo Italian and I work with first-language speakers of both languages. For more about me and how I work, please see www.londonpsychotherapy.org
I work with
- Individuals
- Private healthcare referrals
Special Interests
Like all UKCP registered psychotherapists and psychotherapeutic counsellors I can work with a wide range of issues, but here are some areas in which I have a special interest or additional experience.
Abuse in all its forms can potentially leave a lasting trauma. Left unchecked, it can result in intense suffering for years beyond the actual abuse. This can manifest in dreams, flashbacks, chronic depression, relationship difficulties, personality disorders or destructive behaviours. The consequences can often severely impede your quality of life. I know that if you have suffered abuse, trust comes at a very high premium. Our work provides containment, safety and dependability. Through our partnership, the effects of your abuse can be understood, processed and ultimately survived. The work offers a containing relationship through which your trauma can be borne and metabolised. Nothing can erase what has happened, but our work is to survive it and to finally relegate it to past tense.
Perhaps you have seen yourself begin to function less well at work or in your relationships, or perhaps more generally you are afraid that your using may spiral out of control. While non-addicts seem to be able to take it or leave it, as perhaps you seemed to at first, something in your make-up has made you especially vulnerable to the effects of drugs.
At the root of most addictions is the compulsion to escape difficult feelings that are otherwise unmanageable. The trap in which this places you is that those psychological structures that bind the world of non-addicts together (and where growth can happen) are for you progressively severed by addiction. You end up in a continuous loop of alienation and self-medication, eternally seeking to escape your feelings but at the same time, excluded from a full and productive engagement with the external world. You live as someone in debt to your creditor, (your drug of choice), with ever dwindling resources left for anything - or anyone - else.
Just as the cause of your addiction is personal to you, so too is the 'hit' that soothes, albeit all too briefly. Substituting independence for dependency requires a robust internal cohesion through which difficult feelings can be tolerated. Without that, the prospect of giving up drugs is at best a joyless and at worst, a frightening aspiration.
My job is to help you to understand and to support the internal pressures that have made you vulnerable to addiction. Through the psychological structures that form within the therapeutic relationship, a fundamental shift takes place in which addiction can be supplanted by desire.
Anger may provide you with a sense of power, a defence against a feeling of being crushed. Your anger may be open and violent, or it may be expressed in various forms of passive aggression. Family circumstances can have a part to play in stoking our rage. On the other hand, a calm and loving background is no guarantee against a temperament shaped by an angry society. If we feel bullied, criticised, powerless, racially or sexually abused, we can become hostile in our very being. When we experience others as frustrating, destabilising or threatening, perhaps it is only in being angry that we are able to stand our ground, to feel that we have potency, and a solid sense of who we are. In such cases, anger becomes a hallmark of personality. Controlling or effectively mediating your anger is rarely a free choice. Giving up anger can be as frightening and as vulnerable as having to face its consequences. Our collaboration is a safe environment solid enough to contain your rage as it inevitably enters the therapeutic relationship. My job is to support the vulnerable part of you that lies behind your rage. Our work is a means of metabolising and relinquishing a rage that may otherwise hold you in its grip until you learn to contain and disperse it internally. Our work is a vehicle for fundamental change.
A certain degree of anxiety is necessary in order to survive. We cannot be without it. However what may have begun as a realistic fear in the past (for example, early abuse or bullying), may have developed into a crippling anxiety in the present. In nearly all cases, consciously or unconsciously, there is another person whose attack or judgment we fear, even if objectively we know that there can be no real threat coming our way. Understanding and processing how and why your anxiety has evolved, (bringing what is unconscious into consciousness), is the first step to ultimately unburdening yourself of this potentially inhibiting affliction. I offer a safe and containing therapeutic relationship that will support you in relinquishing your excessive anxiety. Within the safety of our collaboration, your anxiety will be gently exposed to light and air until it becomes more reality-adapted, 'right-sized', and integrated. I work with Generalised Anxiety, Social Anxiety, Complex and Post Traumatic Stress Disorders and work-related stress.
Healing requires us to grieve. Grieving in healthy development is a natural process that usually requires no interference or professional help. The need to grieve not only applies to someone who has passed away, but equally to the end of a relationship in which the loved one is alive but no longer there. Being able to move beyond our loss depends on the tools we have to contain it. Despite the passing of time, some people find themselves unable to move on. You remain stuck in powerful and conflicting feelings about a loss in which something has not been resolved. The lost person cannot help you to heal, while without their presence, you feel that you can’t achieve closure on your own. Perhaps you look at your life, the 'what’s left' without them, and find nothing in it that is worthwhile. When this happens, it is likely that depression and not grieving has taken hold. Depression prevents us from grieving, either for the lost other or for ourselves.
I seek to contain you in your distress and to facilitate your ability to grieve, supporting you to heal from the pain and disorientation of loss. I will support you to grieve for the lost other, for the investment and time you spent and for that vulnerable part of you that is still caught up in the person who is no longer there.
Types of Therapies Offered
- Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
What I can help with
Types of sessions
- Face to Face - Long Term
- Face to Face - Short Term
- Online Therapy
- Telephone Therapy
Archway / Upper Holloway Office
66 Kingsdown RoadArchway / Upper Holloway N19 4LW
United Kingdom
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Cost:
£80Concession:
I offer a discretionary rate of £70 to lower income patients discussible at the assessment stage.UKCP College
- Council for Psychoanalysis and Jungian Analysis College (CPJAC)
Giovanni del Vecchio
Archway / Upper Holloway N19
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