What is Psychotherapy - and how is it different from counselling?

Psychotherapy is the long, disciplined art of learning how you became who you are — and how to stop repeating what hurts you. I use the word counselling on my site because Google demands it, but my actual work is psychotherapy: a rigorous, years-long training in the anatomy of the unconscious, the shape of human defenses, the architecture of attachment, the choreography of re-enactment and the quiet laws of transformation.

Where counselling often focuses on support or solutions, psychotherapy is concerned with something far more radical: freedom. Because until you understand the patterns you are unconsciously re-enacting — the familiar hurt you keep circling back to, the roles you slip into without noticing, the emotional loops that feel like “just life” — you are not choosing your days. You are reliving them.

Most people wake up inside the same psychological weather every morning: the same fear, the same self-abandonment, the same arguments with different faces, the same ache dressed in new clothes. It feels like bad luck or fate or “just how I am,” but in truth it is a quiet, relentless repetition of what the psyche hasn’t yet resolved. That is the merry-go-round: beautiful horses, painted differently each time, but spinning the same old circle.

Psychotherapy steps in at the level beneath behaviour. It listens for the origin story — the first time you learned to silence yourself, to earn love, to hide, to control, to disappear, to please, to harden. It tracks the moment you traded truth for safety or authenticity for acceptance. It sits beside you as the unconscious reveals the small, loyal ways you have tried to protect yourself, even as those protections keep you bound.

This work does not aim to make you “better.” It aims to make you aware, and from awareness comes the first true taste of choice. Choice is not willpower. It is consciousness. It is the power to step off the pattern you didn’t know you were performing. It is the soft, seismic moment when you realise:
I don’t have to live the way my history trained me.

That is the difference. Counselling may help you cope. Psychotherapy helps you wake up.

Psychotherapy is where the unconscious becomes conscious, where reflex becomes intention, where inherited behaviour becomes voluntary living. Its purpose is liberation — not from life, but from the invisible choreography running your life.

And when that happens, even once, everything changes.

what can I help you with? The Part of your life that is no longer working… the problem under all the problems.

I work with the full, unedited human experience; the quiet anxieties that live under your skin, the marriages fraying at the seams, the grief you carry like a second spine. I sit with the heaviness of depression, the restless mind that won’t switch off, the shame that curls inward, the betrayals that hollow you out, and the family patterns you keep repeating even as they exhaust you. I help with the lost seasons of life, the procrastination that feels like paralysis, the lack of motivation that feels like failure, the fear that you’re not becoming who you are meant to be. Whether you’re facing a crisis, an old wound - be it a past trauma, experience of abuse, a relationship on its last thread, or simply the overwhelming ache of being human, my work meets you where you are, without judgement, without pretence and without conditions. Here, anything that is real, anything that is true, anything that is yours is welcome.

I also work extensively with high-functioning individuals - whether one seeks self actualisation or the ones who look composed on the outside while privately wrestling with pressure, perfectionism, and the relentless demand to be more. My work supports those who are driven, capable, and successful, yet still feel an inner restlessness, a hunger to grow, or a sense that their deeper potential remains unopened. With high achievers, the task is less about “fixing” and more about refinement — clearing the inner noise, dissolving old patterns, and creating the psychological space where self-actualisation becomes not just possible, but inevitable.

Essentially there is nothing depth Psychotherapy does not work with…the real question is - What is really driving you here?

what can I expect at my first session? the opening chapter… crossing the threshold…the beginning of the conversation beneath the conversation.

Your first session is the moment the room shifts - the place where you finally speak the truth you’ve been carrying in fragments. Where everything begins to make sense…It’s the beginning of what you’ve avoided, but also what you’ve secretly craved: clarity, confrontation, relief. In the first session, the story you’ve been living unconsciously begins to reveal its architecture and the patterns you’ve repeated without knowing start to show their seams. This is your first step into your own depths, the place where instinct meets insight, where the body tells its version, and where the mind stops negotiating with itself. It’s the threshold moment - the one where everything you’ve half-known becomes fully illuminated. Here, things begin to gain structure and start to make sense. Depth Psychotherapy alters the quiet engine of your life. When you begin to understand yourself at depth, you stop reacting and start choosing. You stop living from old wounds and start living from truth. Psychodynamic therapy doesn’t just give you insight - it rewires the hidden reasons behind your decisions, your patterns, your relationships, your self-worth. It clears the static so you can hear your own instinct again. It returns you to the place in yourself that is capable, intuitive, unafraid. This is the work that makes you stronger, clearer, braver, more alive. It gives you back the parts you abandoned and reveals the ones you never knew were there. This is why people come: not for coping strategies, but for transformation. Not for survival, but for self-possession. Not to be fixed, but to finally become who they were always meant to be.

How often are sessions - what is the duration/frequency??

I offer depth Psychotherapy and sessions are weekly. Depth work needs rhythm. It needs a heartbeat. Individuals come every week because real change grows in continuity. When we meet weekly, the thread between sessions stays alive — the unconscious keeps speaking, the story keeps unfolding, and the work can travel beneath the surface instead of starting over each time. Weekly contact gives the psyche a place to return to, a steady ground where what is hidden can finally step forward. This is how the work deepens. This is how it holds. Appointments are at the same time on the same day weekly.

Can I come less frequently or when i feel i want to?

No. Here is the reason why I do not take individuals who cannot commit to weekly Psychotherapy. I don’t take clients who cannot commit to weekly psychotherapy, and here is why: when the work is inconsistent, it becomes psychodynamically messy - disjointed, fragmented, and impossible to hold with integrity. Depth work needs continuity the way a flame needs still air. Weekly sessions create the spine of the therapy - the steady frame that allows the unconscious to speak in its own language, without being interrupted, diluted, or lost. When someone drops in and out, the thread breaks: defences reset themselves, patterns blur, the emotional landscape reshuffles and countertransference becomes an echo instead of a compass. The symbolic meaning of the relationship cannot unfold, regression cannot safely take place, and the alliance remains shallow because it has nothing solid to root into. What the individual brings, repeats, reveals and shifts becomes scattered, and the work turns into isolated events rather than a coherent process. This is why sporadic attendance is essentially like trying to keep a candle lit in a wind tunnel - the light flickers, but it cannot hold long enough to become transformation. Here, we protect the flame so it can grow into something steady, strong and life-changing. Unfortunately if you require flexibility I’m not the right therapist for you. What I offer is steadiness - a consistent, reliable space where depth, continuity and real growth and transformation can take root.

How long does Psychotherapy take?

Therapy takes as long as it takes to stop living the life you’ve outgrown. There is no stopwatch on the unconscious, no neat timeline for grief, trauma, longing, or truth. Some people spend their whole lives skimming the surface, rearranging symptoms, patching cracks. Depth work chooses a different route: it goes to the root. And roots take time. The hard work miracles of life can take some time - depending on the effort one decides to invest.

How long this journey is depends on what you’re carrying, how tightly you’ve learned to hold it, and how ready you are to let the walls soften. It depends on whether you want relief or transformation. Because transformation - the real, cellular, identity-level kind - cannot be rushed, packaged, or scheduled like a gym membership. It unfolds at the pace your psyche can tolerate, the pace your defences can loosen, the pace your body can finally exhale.

The truth is simple: what you prioritise grows. When you prioritise depth, you change from the inside out. When you prioritise speed, you stay exactly where you are because for humans change tends to take a bit of time.

Therapy takes the time it takes for you to meet yourself honestly… and that moment, when it arrives, is worth every week it required to get there. Therapy is an investment, a purchase that doesn’t end up in a drawer or a landfill… It is cheaper than the chaos that comes from avoiding life’s problems.

Let’s be honest - if you are asking this question it due to the financial aspect as Psychotherapy is an investment in your SELF. And truly — people will spend a fortune maintaining the life that’s breaking them, but question the cost of changing it. Therapy is the only purchase that replaces drama with clarity, chaos with coherence, and self-abandonment with self-respect. It’s value, not vanity. Humans are excellent at pouring money into maintaining the very life that’s draining them, but hesitate at investing in the one thing that would actually set them free. Therapy isn’t expensive — repeating the same patterns for another decade is.

Psychotherapy is the only thing you buy that actually pays you back!

why does this work feel different from counselling & cbt?

There are many forms of support, and each has its place. Some approaches offer tools, tips, and techniques to help you manage the moment — practical, structured, often short-term. They steady the surface. And for many people, that’s enough.

But the work I do is not about managing the moment. It is about meeting the self.

Psychotherapy asks something different of both of us: time, devotion, emotional stamina, and the courage to explore what lives beneath the patterns you’ve rehearsed for years. This isn’t symptom-management or cognitive reshuffling. It is a slow descent into the deeper architecture of your psyche — the inherited narratives, the unconscious loyalties, the protective myths you’ve built to survive. It’s work that requires me to be more than a technician; it demands a years-long apprenticeship in holding complexity, in tracking the unseen, in recognising what is unsaid but powerfully present.

Counselling and CBT can offer tools; psychotherapy offers transformation. Tools adjust your behaviour. Depth work alters your being. Because at its core, psychodynamic psychotherapy doesn’t just look at what you do — it looks at who you became in order to survive. It traces the quiet reenactments you keep slipping into: the old wounds you replay with new people, the familiar disappointments you accidentally rebuild, the childhood echoes that follow you into every adult room. This work goes to the origin point, the first script you were handed, and lets you rewrite it from the inside out.

This is why the process feels different. It doesn’t rush, it doesn’t reduce, it doesn’t flatten your experience into a worksheet or a thought record. Instead, it invites you into a conversation with parts of yourself you’ve never had language for — the parts you abandoned, defended against, or simply outgrew without realising.

The work we do together is not about fixing you. It is about revealing you — the you beneath the coping strategies, beneath the persona, beneath the “I’m fine.” And when that self comes forward, whole and unguarded, everything else shifts in response.

This is why it feels different. Because it is.

Do you work online or only in person?

I work best in person, where presence can breathe and the room itself becomes part of the healing. But life is life - babies arrive, bodies ache, oceans sit between us and sometimes the heart asks for support even when geography won’t cooperate. In those moments, I do offer online work, quietly and case by case. If you’re unsure, reach out. Tell me your circumstances. We’ll talk it through together and see what fits your world, not a fixed rule.

For those living outside the EU, I also offer online coaching. It’s a lighter, future-focused way of working that can be a beautiful fit when therapy isn’t the appropriate pathway. If you’re abroad and feel drawn to work together, reach out — we can explore whether coaching is the right doorway for your situation.

Do you work with children, teenagers, couples & families or just adults?

I work with adults, couples, and teenagers — the places where the inner world, the relational field, and the emerging self are most alive. I do not work with young children.
With adults, the work stretches into depth, insight, pattern, and liberation. With couples, we enter the living laboratory of the relationship — where re-enactments reveal themselves, where communication becomes consciousness, and where the emotional ecology between two people can transform everything.

Teenagers are a different kind of doorway. They rarely arrive alone — not because they are incapable, but because teenagers live inside systems, and systems create symptoms. Unless a teen has been bullied, traumatised, or is facing something distinctly outside the family environment, most adolescent distress is woven into the home itself. And so, when someone under 18 comes to me, parents come first — because the landscape the child is growing in must be understood before the child is asked to do the emotional heavy lifting.

The process is simple, respectful, and deeply effective:
Session one: parents only.
Session two: parents and teen together.
Six sessions with the teenager to explore, untangle, and unfold.
Then a regroup — a recalibration of the family system so change doesn’t fall on young shoulders alone.

I do not work with full family groups in the room; my work is directed, contained, and precise. Three is often a crowd — and depth requires clarity, not chaos.

So yes, I work with adults, couples, and teenagers.
But with teens especially, the work is never just about “the teen.”
It is about the system that shaped them, the dynamics that surround them, and the possibility of shifting something at the root — so the young person doesn’t spend their adult life repairing what their childhood wired into them.

What if i don’t know what to talk about, feel embarrassed or ashamed of my issues?

Come as you are… You don’t need to arrive polished, prepared, or certain. Most people sit down not knowing where to start; many carry embarrassment, shame, or the fear that their story is somehow “too much.” It isn’t. Nothing you bring will shock me or unsettle the room — the human psyche is far too vast and far too familiar for that. If anything, the things you’re most afraid to name are usually the doorway in. We start where you are, with whatever rises first — a sentence, a silence, a feeling you can’t quite translate. That’s enough. The work unfolds from there.

can i bring notes, a journal, or things i’ve written? do you give homework?

Yes. Bring whatever is moving inside you.
Some people write to steady themselves.
Some write to witness their own truth.
Some arrive with pages because it feels safer to offer ink before offering breath.

All of that is welcome.
Your psyche is speaking long before you sit in the chair — sometimes through dreams, images, scribbled fragments, sudden insights, or sentences you weren’t ready to say out loud. If writing helps you surface what lives beneath the noise, bring it.

And while this work does not unfold through worksheets, checklists, or tidy tasks assigned for later, if you crave structure, we explore that longing too. Sometimes the request for “homework” is actually a request for containment, rhythm, reassurance, or mastery. Sometimes it’s a remnant of schoolroom survival. Sometimes it’s an earnest attempt to accelerate your healing by sheer force of will. Whatever the origin, it is never dismissed — it becomes part of the work.

But understand this:
Psychodynamic depth is not powered by external tasks.
It is powered by what happens between us — the micro-shifts, the truths that slip out unguarded, the re-enactments you don’t know you’re performing, the emotional weather that changes the moment you enter the room.

Writing can illuminate.
Free association liberates.
A curated narrative shows me who you believe yourself to be; the unfiltered flow reveals the parts of you waiting to be known. Both have their place. Both are doorways. The art is in knowing when to follow the polished story and when to gently lift the stone beneath it.

So yes — bring your journal, your notes, your midnight confessions.
But also bring your pauses, your contradictions, your half-formed thoughts, the thing you almost say and then swallow. That is where the psyche truly speaks.

And that is where the work lives.

what if i start feeling worse before i feel better?

In depth psychotherapy, there are moments when the ground shifts. When the truths you’ve buried for years rise up with force. When the psyche finally exhales after holding its breath for decades. It can feel like a temporary unravelling — as though you’ve opened a skip of accumulated life material and everything you’ve avoided is suddenly in the light.

This isn’t failure.
It’s movement.
It’s the psyche beginning to reorganise.

But here’s the part most people never hear:
A skilled psychodynamic therapist doesn’t let you walk out the door in fragments.
The work may take you deep, but the ending of each session is designed for re-gathering — stabilising, grounding, re-orienting you to the present so you can step back into your life with coherence and dignity. Insight is allowed to carry you, but dysregulation is not allowed to swallow you.

You will not be left raw, spinning, or unanchored.
Containment is the invisible architecture of this work.
Boundaries aren’t restrictions — they are scaffolding, the frame that lets you descend safely and return intact.

Yes, there may be weeks when you feel tender, stirred, emotional, or unsettled. That is the psyche unfreezing what has been locked away. But you are not journeying alone, and you are not expected to “manage” it by yourself between sessions. We pace this work. We track your nervous system closely. We follow the thread without tearing the weave.

Depth work asks something of you — courage, honesty, presence — but it also gives back: clarity, strength, emotional bandwidth, internal freedom. Feeling “worse” is not a sign of regression; it’s often the exact moment before something reorganises into truth.

Think of it as the storm that breaks the pressure system.
The moment the ground softens before new roots take hold.

You will be held, contained, and supported through every phase of that process.
This work may unsettle you at times — but it will not abandon you.

why do old memories & emotions come back up? why do I dream more when therapy begins?

The past is not a place you left; it is a weather system that follows you. What we call “old” memories are not dust in an attic but living engines that keep running beneath the ordinary day. In therapy, those engines begin to make noise because something in the present finally allows them to: containment, attention, and steady, weekly presence. When the room becomes safe enough, the psyche stops pretending the past is politely shelved and starts showing you the scripts it has been performing on loop.

Regressions are not breakdowns; they are returns — a descent into earlier psychic territory where old needs, fears, and strategies first learned for survival still sit like furniture you never rearranged. Psychic time is elastic: childhood sorrow, adolescent shame, the first betrayal — they are not locked in chronological order. They show up now because the situation, relationship, or feeling in your adult life is calling for the same response you learned years ago. You don’t “become a child” again; you reenact the child’s solution because the adult brain, unpractised in new responses, hands the stage back to what it knows.

The presenting past is the part of history that still presents itself — in your reactions, in who you pick, in the arguments that keep repeating with different partners, in the way you apologise before you are accused. These repeats have grammar: familiar gestures, predicted ruptures, the same small, loyal betrayals. Psychodynamic work listens for the grammar and then asks: who wrote these sentences and why were they necessary then? When we trace the origin — the earliest drafts of your coping — you begin to see that what felt like fate was actually habit, and habit can be edited.

Symbolic meaning is how the mind translates trauma into theatre. A missed call can carry the meaning of an abandoned childhood evening. A partner’s silence can echo a parent’s withdrawal. The world is forever acting out scenes from the past; therapy teaches you to see the stage directions. Once you can read the symbolism, you can stop mistaking it for the script of your life.

This is why memories resurface: not to torment you, but to teach you. They arrive when the container is steady enough for them to be told, felt, and reworked. They come to be understood, mourned, and re-situated — so they stop running the show without your consent.

Dreams are the psyche’s postal service; when repression eases, the mailroom overflows. As you give the unconscious a weekly address — a room that will listen without collapsing — pieces that were previously censored begin to queue up for delivery. Night becomes the theatre where the material you cannot say in daylight stages itself: images, metaphors, landscapes, impossible conversations. Dreaming intensifies because the mind finally has permission to move what it could not carry in waking restraint.

There are three simple truths about this flood:

1. Dreams are rehearsal. The psyche practices new endings, tries out courage in disguised form, and experiments with different responses to old scenes.

2. Dreams are integration. As you experience new feelings in therapy, the unconscious needs to assimilate them. Dreams stitch new threads into old cloth.

3. Dreams are release. What was held rigidly in waking life — shame, rage, terror, longing — can spill into nocturnal imagery where it can be symbolised and metabolised.

When repression breaks or suppression loosens, dream material can be vivid, grotesque, hilarious, or oddly mundane. That is the mind working: alchemy, not accident. Night-time imagery often presents the emotional truth before the conscious mind can name it in daylight. You may wake bewildered, raw, or lighter — sometimes all at once. That bewilderment is a sign the work is moving below the surface.

In practical terms, more dreaming is a good sign. It means the internal pressure that kept memory, affect, and image pinned down is changing. It means the psyche is engaged with the therapeutic process and is using every available channel to be heard. We read those dreams together; we treat them as data — not prophecy, not pathology — but as clear, valuable language from the parts of you that speak less often.

Both the resurfacing of old material and the flood of dreams are not problems to be fixed; they are openings. They are the raw, necessary labour of a psyche rearranging itself. In the right container — steady, weekly, attentive — they do not break you. They teach you how to wield yourself with more choice, more clarity, and more agency. The past shows up so you can finally re-author it; the night speaks so you can begin to translate.

When those storms arrive, you will have a hand on the rope. You will be held. And slowly, over time, what once compelled you will become something you understand, name and no longer need to repeat.