Psychotherapeutic Approaches

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Short-Term Counseling

Short-term counseling includes a variety of approaches that address situational stressors with an eye towards problem solving. Often, the techniques coach you in changing thoughts and actions to change your feelings. If you are experiencing situational anxiety, stress, or depression, you may find relief with just a few sessions. Short-term counseling can also be helpful as you negotiate life transistions such as job changes, the birth of a child, aging parents, school graduations, or geographical moves.


Medium-Term Counseling

By working with the situation that has brought you into therapy, emotions, memories, and patterns that have been in the shadow (unconscious) may begin to emerge. You may feel a need to explore these more deeply. As previously unseen energies come into consciousness, you experience a greater sense of mastery in your life.


Psychoanalysis

Analysis is a deeper process and requires a longer term commitment. Its goal is to build a conscious relationship to the unconscious. The unconscious is not only the source of that which has been set aside; it holds the creative seeds of our psyche/soul. Once you have moved through the adaptive or false self and the historical filters or learned patterns of childhood have lost power, your connection to the larger Self or Mystery within is more accessible. You are able to more freely access the heart's desires. The result is the needed energy or libido (life force) to act in accordance with your soul.

The relationship between the analysand and analyst becomes a container where unintegrated emotions that unconsciously determine our day-to-day functioning come to the surface. Sitting together, listening to the deeper layers of psyche, builds a relationship to psyche/soul that invites organic (automatic) shifts in how you function internally and externally. Problematic patterns of behavior, personality traits, learned ways of being are seen.  

As you connect to the emotion/energy in these states, positive changes occur within your inner world.  The inner change allows outer change. Your life and relationships improve. The ego, conscious sense of self, begins to be in conscious dialogue with the larger Self, the totality of psyche. You then have a sense of your soul that guides you through life. You begin to see meaning in the ordinary; you experience increased energy as you are connected to your larger Self. 



© Kathleen Wiley 2013-2016