Approach

What is a life lived with such intensity and depth that there is no room left over for dissatisfaction? Imagine if your relationships were so intimate, and your work was challenging, inspiring and financially rewarding in return. What if you lived without regret, intensely in love, sexuality, artistically, financially, and in your family life...

What would it take to bravely venture into this way of living?

The process of therapy is doing deep inner personal work to overcome the experiences and conditioning of the past to bravely face the potential of our unwritten future.

Early childhood experiences and societal conditioning imprint upon us and we need to work to root out what was hurtful and limiting.

Then we can summon the courage to make decisions. We learn to make those choices even in the face of uncertainty of outcomes and our fear of failure and making mistakes. And dive into the adventure of the great mystery of who we actually are.

Allow yourself to flow freely in your feelings without repression or amplification. They come and they go like clouds in the sky on a clear day. Clarity in our thinking reveals that life does not come with any apparent meaning. If there is a meaning to life, we do not seem to be privy to what it is. Life seems, simply absurd. But the absurd can be met with delight and enjoyment. In the openness of the absence of meaning, we can recognize our freedom to create whatever we would like to create. What would you like to create in this life?

Katherine also draws on the Jungian school in working with each individual's masculine and feminine sides and the integration of the two into dynamic balance. Are you familiar with the archetypes within you? Which ones tend to show up? Which ones tend to take you over?

Schools of Therapy

I work with clients to help them identify where they would like to evolve to, and how they would like their lives to look differently. I am a transpersonal therapist, meaning that therapy does not end with how we think, feel and behave but can go beyond examining the body/mind and consider consciousness itself. Generally, I draw from the psychodynamic, humanistic, and existential schools of therapy but I also draw from Jungian Therapy as well as the Advaita (nondual) and Tantric schools of Hinduism. When we have access to depths of consciousness the self can relax and open up, integrate split off shadow aspects making it more flexible to change problematic patterns.

During counselling I consider the individual in terms of their ongoing development emotionally, cognitively, socially, biologically, inter-personally, spiritually, socio-economically and more. Also important are the client’s particular personality type and other identities that are important to him or her.

I am influenced by the work of Ken Wilber the American philosopher who penned Integral Theory. His meta-theory of psychological development allows me to understand the individual client in a truly holistic sense.

I also draw on Integral Theory to select which of the therapeutic schools will be best suited to the particular problems a client is asking for help with.

Outcomes of Therapy

Depending on the client’s preferences and conscious and unconscious needs, the goals of therapy may be meaningful living, effective development, more harmonious or satisfying relationships, a more peaceful mind, a more active life, flexibility in feeling more deeply and also being able to regulate emotion, increased confidence, responsibility and empathy as well as many different specific outcomes someone may wish to achieve.

In co-creation with the client, we together create a unique therapy for each individual. This is an ongoing, dynamic process that changes as client and counsellor affect and change one another.

Change

The first step in changing is becoming aware of what we want to change. It sounds obvious, but in fact we are often quite unaware of what is causing our difficulties. Awareness itself is curative, and awareness of when we are aware creates an increasing sense of freedom and joy.

When we are really struggling, either within ourselves, or externally with others, there is often a sense of being lost or being blind to what is really going on. Effective therapy helps us awaken. It helps us see ourselves, but that is actually quite a strange thing to say. We see ourselves? Who is looking at whom exactly?

This strange phenomenon of looking at ourselves is precisely how we develop and change for the better. We begin to see aspects of ourselves—our behavior, our thought processes, our emotions. As we see those aspects they begin to lose their hold on us, that is, we stop identifying with them, and begin to identify as that which looks or witnesses.

These behaviours, feelings, thoughts are no longer automatic, unexamined habits they are now things we can look at, analyze, influence and direct. More and more is revealed; we come to know ourselves better. We are more awake! We find ourselves increasingly able to imagine and decide to act more in alignment with what we deeply want instead of being driven by false desires arising from insecurities. In this way, developing our awareness literally gives us the freedom to choose to act differently. This awareness and our subsequent choices to act and think differently can cause our painful symptoms of anxiety, depression and relationship strife to dissipate. Amazing, that simple awareness is such a powerful part of change.

Of course, the work does not end with awareness alone. Action needs to be taken. New skills need to be learned and integrated. Internal conflict needs to be worked through, however awareness is a critical first step.

With continued, careful attention to the nuances of thoughts and feelings we begin to develop a compassionate container where we can start to make changes because we have dropped the painful habit of being overly critical or subtly aggressive towards ourselves.

Once we have the safety that comes from compassion, we can begin to really look at ourselves and identify subtle feelings we aren’t usually aware of. When we tune in we’ll see that feelings occur for only moments before we usually act in the same repetitive patterns. As we become aware of our feelings and realize what is driving the automatic repetitive patterns, we can choose differently.

We may discover we act from a feeling of inadequacy or hungry jealousy or panicky fear. Knowing this, we develop a plan to pause and reflect the next time the same pattern arises. Then, interrupting the automatic habit, we begin to practice new skills until they become second nature. As we begin to behave differently, people treat us differently, as a positive feedback loop begins to ensue.

So often we find our patterns of thinking, feeling and behavior began so long ago in a context where they made some sense. They were helpful at that time, but without enough conscious awareness of the new, adult context, they became the problem.

In therapy we trace where a particular pattern came from, disentangle it from our present life circumstances and interpret situations again with clarity and greater insight. This can release us from long standing pain, and show us the opportunity to see present circumstances more clearly. For those of us with painful pasts, we can learn to soothe ourselves in ways we may never have known.

When we find this freedom to change, to find something new, we truly become authors of our own lives. We can choose not to interpret someone declining our invitation as a personal sleight and be free of the feeling of rejection. Or, we could recognize our spouse does not actually cause our pain and our reactions; we are causing them ourselves through our participation in a repetitive pattern with the spouse where our interpretations, our reactions and our dependencies fuel a cycle. We find we could choose not to yell at them this time, and break the pattern, for example.

Ultimately, we can remember to recognize what we are grateful for or passionate about. When we become aware how we create and maintain patterns, we can choose to live with love, generosity, meaning and depth.