I work in the tradition of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan's work has been hugely influential and around the world it is the form of psychoanalysis most widely practiced today.
Everybody is different. Nobody's life stories or the difficulties they encounter are quite the same. At the basis of the way I work is giving people a space to talk about themselves and their lives as freely and in as much detail as possible.
This includes exploring aspects of their life they may rarely discuss with anyone else, but are central to the person they've become and the difficulties they face. And it means giving people the chance to uncover the things they don't know about themselves - what's unconscious to them - that have often shaped their lives in profound ways.
People sometimes wonder how speaking, even in this way, is going to change things? Speaking brings clarity. It changes our relationship to things. It allows us to work through and come to terms with what's happened to us. In these ways it lets us change our problems into something else. Anxieties can reduce or disappear, depressions fade, relationships are viewed in a different light, solutions are found, life starts to make sense in new ways.