Therapy with Angie

"Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Irvin Yalom

My aim is to help you gain a better understanding of how your emotional and physical needs are connected. I can help you explore your thoughts, feelings, behaviours, beliefs and values. This gives you the opportunity to identify the choices, patterns of behaviour and obstacles that are preventing you from reaching your full potential.  

My training is in Gestalt psychotherapy which is a humanistic, person-centred, and holistic therapeutic approach. Gestalt therapy is centred on increasing your awareness of your experiences and your reality. 

My aim as a Gestalt therapist is to encourage you to address your feelings instead of avoiding them and to focus on where you feel certain emotions in your body. Sessions with me consist of a dialogue, rather than techniques; this is how I engage in the awareness-raising process. 

Your sessions with me will not follow specific guidelines. I tend to  to use creativity in my approach, depending on the context and my client's personality. What is consistent is the emphasis on direct contact between me and you, direct experience and experimentation, and the focus on the “what and how”—what you're doing and how you're doing it—and the “here and now.”

Gestalt therapy is also experimental. I might sometimes invite you to participate in a creative experiment in the room (and of course you might not want to, and that's okay!). The purpose of experiments in Gestalt is to move from simply talking about something to experiencing it. 

A classic example is ‘the empty chair’. Instead of telling me about how you feel about someone, I would invite you to pretend that this person is in the empty chair and to tell them directly how you feel. We might also do dream work, exaggeration exercises, role-playing, re-enactment, or artistic exercises like drawing and painting.

My approach is multicultural, meaning that I will work with you to understand the difficulties you are experiencing from the unique perspective of your culture. 

My therapeutic approach takes into account many forms of diversity,  including: Racial, Ethnic, Sexual, Spiritual, Socioeconomic background and Disability.  

I will engage with you in an honest, respectful, compassionate and vibrant way. I try to meet you from one human being to another, rather than treat or analyse you in the medical sense. 

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” 

 Anais Nin

I am a trainee Gestalt psychotherapist, completing my final year of training at the Metanoia Institute in London.  I have in the past worked in the fields of investigative journalism and human rights law, researching and reporting on women's rights, refugee rights, political corruption and extremist ideology. 

Growing up in different countries, belonging to more than one culture, speaking more than one language, adapting to new living conditions every few years, living and working with individuals from different backgrounds… mean that I have developed an open mind and that I can look at the world from different perspectives. 

My multicultural background makes me a non-judgmental and compassionate therapist, and helps me understand and counsel individuals from all kinds of cultural and social backgrounds, ethnicities, and ethos.

In my therapeutic work, as well as in my personal life, I adhere to the Gestalt school of thought. It means that I  am concerned with the whole person and I encourage a balance between body, feeling, intellect and imagination. I consider the client's environment (including where they live and work), their social connections (including friends, family, and co-workers), their background (including childhood experiences and educational level), and their physical health (including current wellness and stress levels).

 I work with different issues including: Anxiety, Borderline processes, Depression, Domestic abuse, Race and identity issues, Relationship issues, Low self-esteem, Bereavement and loss, Emotional abuse, PTSD, Sexual abuse, Self-harm, Stress and Trauma. 

I have over 300 hours of supervised clinical experience working with adults in various low-cost counselling services in London.. 

My current placement involves counselling migrants, refugees and asylum seekers who have survived exile, torture, human trafficking and modern slavery.

I work with individuals on an open-ended basis. I work in English, French and Arabic. 

I see clients online and face-to-face in Fulham SW6. 

I am a UKAGP member and a trainee registered member of UKCP. 

I adhere to the UKCP code of ethics.

.

"If you take responsibility for what you are doing to yourself, how you produce your symptoms, how you produce your illness, how you produce your existence-the very moment you get in touch with yourself-growth begins, integration begins."

Fritz Perls

Gestalt therapy is an influential and popular form of psychotherapy that was developed by Fritz Perls, Laura Perls, and Paul Goodman in the 1940s, as an experiential and humanistic form of therapy. The word 'gestalt' comes from the German word meaning shape or form, and it references the character or essence of something. 

Gestalt psychotherapy borrows heavily from psychoanalysis, gestalt psychology, existential philosophy, zen Buddhism and Taoism. It is an amalgamation of different theoretical ideas and includes elements from more fringe elements of psychology, such as psychodrama and role-playing. 

At the core of gestalt therapy is the holistic view that people are intricately linked to and influenced by their environments and that all people strive toward growth and balance. Gestalt therapy is similar to person-centred therapy in its emphasis on the therapist’s use of empathy, understanding, and unconditional acceptance of the client.

In Gestalt therapy, the goal is greater awareness, including your awareness of yourself, your choices, responsibility and your environment. You will learn to discover feelings that may have been suppressed or masked by other feelings and to accept and trust your emotions. The focus is on your emotions in the here and now, but this does not negate or reduce past events in your life. The past is intricately linked to your present experience and your past experiences will most likely be addressed in therapy sessions. 

Gestalt therapy is based on dialogue, which means therapist and client engage in an authentic, trusting dialogue where both express their experiences and observations as two humans, not as patient and expert. 

A core concept of Gestalt therapy is the idea that the more you try to actively change yourself to be something that you are not, the more you stay the same. 

Strangely it is only when you stop trying to force yourself to change, that you allow yourself to be in a state to grow and develop naturally. This idea is known as the Paradoxical Theory of Change. 

With this in mind, a Gestalt therapist's approach to growth and change is not to try and help you come up with a strategy to change your behaviour or thoughts directly. Rather a Gestalt therapist will work with you to help you develop your self-awareness and how you operate and make sense of the world. From there you can reconnect with your true self and have a foundation to grow and develop meaningfully and sustainably.