Although I can provide short-term support and counselling to parents of teens, as well as short-term individual work with teens and adults, what I am most interested in and equipped to offer, is longer-term individual therapy. We often think of Social Workers intervening when there has been acute abuse/trauma or when things fall apart systemically on a larger social/societal scale such as with communities experiencing extreme poverty or injustice. Although those aspects do affect us and require intervention, most often, it is the small, daily ways in which our earliest developmental needs are not met, often without any malice or conscious intent to harm, that have the most corrosive impact on the shaping of our internal worlds. As a Social Worker with an understanding of my clients' internal as well as external world, I am well placed to walk this journey to emotional healing with you. 

 

What can you expect when a mental health practitioner says they work from a psycho-therapeutic perspective?

 

I refer you to the image to the left - It is a photo of a Ceder tree that I took in the Cederberg wilderness area. As you can see, there are two parts to the same tree; one part is dead, and the other has strong and vibrant new growth and life. Psychodynamic psychotherapy is based on an in-depth understanding of how we develop a sense of self, how that self-views and experiences others, and how that self is able to, or perhaps not able to, connect with others. It is a process of discovering which aspects of the self are causing death/destruction, or becoming aware of those parts that have perhaps never been fully alive. Then, importantly, it is a journey of creating new and healthier ways of being.  It is a journey of creating new life and growth from the same root. Most of what we do, think and feel are driven by our subconscious. When working from a psychodynamic perspective, exploring and working with our subconscious motivations are key. 

 

When a fault, weakness or distinctive feature is introduced in the shaping of a clay pot, it becomes 'baked into' the pot as it is fired in the kiln. So, too, with humans. When we struggle with certain behaviours and thought patterns that we can't seem to shift, we often need to return to the point at which that behaviour or thought pattern became active in the shaping of the self. Knowing what went wrong and when it happened is very important in understanding how our sense of self has come to be. The therapeutic relationship is there to empathically nurture new ways of viewing the self and others. Within the therapeutic relationship painful and difficult feelings can be held, felt and explored.