City Road Therapy – Professional face-to-face & online Therapy in London

Jan O’Mahony

My website: www.janomahonycounselling.co.uk

I am a MBACP registered counsellor and have been in private practice for over 20 years. I work with individuals, from teenagers to the elderly and all those in between, as well as couples. Therapy can be either on a short term basis of 10 to 20 sessions or on an open-ended basis long term.

Psychodynamic and existential psychotherapy with Jan

Counselling is a collaborative process where we work together to get a better understanding of you. It is not like going to a doctor where you describe your symptoms, then await treatment: you are an active participant. Through giving focused attention to how you experience different situations and people, you will come to recognise some of your underlying assumptions and beliefs which influence the way you see yourself and your relationship to others. You are also likely to see where some of these attitudes originated. Through an emerging new perspective on yourself you can gain greater freedom and a range of opportunities in your life and relationships.

My theoretical approach is a mixture of psychodynamic and existential. Psychodynamic stresses the significance of our early childhood experience in shaping our sense of self and our patterns of relating and highlights how these are still active in our adult relationships even though we are unaware of them and they may no longer reflect our adult status.

From existential psychotherapy I agree that there are certain fundamental aspects of human existence which challenge us and can make us anxious: we must create meaning in our lives; our lives are finite; we are ultimately alone; and we are thrown into a world not of our making. To encounter any of these may be challenging but are not pathological and can, indeed, highlight our freedom to pursue a life of meaning and significance in our own terms.