What is Contemporary Psychotherapy?

Psychotherapy is a form of talking therapy which aims to enable you, the client, to understand your feelings. Your therapist will work with you to help you gain a better insight into why you are feeling the way you are and will help you to explore the issues that you are currently facing.

As a Contemporary Psychotherapist I believe that my client is the expert on themselves and it is my job as the therapist to provide the appropriate circumstance within which you can make your changes, based on what you need at the time therefore therapy is personalised for each client.

Contemporary Psychotherapy respects the client's context, resources and needs and is flexible in its approach, which means that the Contemporary Psychotherapist will respond to the needs of each individual and use concepts, strategies and specific interventions from a range of therapeutic modalities.

The Contemporary Psychotherapy therapeutic relationship provides the client with an opportunity to recognise reoccurring patterns as it uses the client’s full life trajectory. By using sensory acuity Contemporary Psychotherapy helps the client to understand their own internal representation of their past, present and future. This modality of therapy offers a learning opportunity for the client to fully understand the causes of their challenges, their immediate needs and their future well-being; it helps the client to claim a valuable life narrative and work towards removing limiting beliefs. Contemporary Psychotherapy responds to social context and change and uses the clients on-going personal growth as a tool in the therapeutic encounter.

The Contemporary Psychotherapist can use Meta-Model questioning to illicit information, challenge and to expand the limits to a person’s model of the world. Using the Meta Model we can understand the distortions, generalisations, and deletions in the speaker’s language. We can use the Meta Model to understand the client’s mental states through their words and bring awareness to the unconscious deletions, distortions and generalisations. The Contemporary Psychotherapist can use chunking questions to find higher meaning in what their client is saying and can also use chunking to find specific clarification in relation to missing information, helping the client to understand their thought processes and experiences further.

Contemporary Psychotherapy helps us to build rapport using modelling, matching, mirroring, pacing and leading. Rapport must be the basis for any meaningful interaction, it establishes an environment of trust and understanding and allows respect of each other’s worlds. This process should allow our client to feel respected, listened to and heard, it also allows the therapist to see the world from their clients perspective, feel the way that they do and get a better understanding of the challenges that they are facing – as a result of this the therapeutic relationship will be enhanced and the client may hopefully feel safe to explore other thoughts and perspectives.