Psychotherapy is working alongside a client to allow them to explore and develop the nature of the issues that bring them to therapy and to develop their potential to consider alternative ways of understanding, experiencing and interacting with their world that allows a greater sense of choice and potential.

Ian is an experienced psychotherapist who will work with clients with a range of presentations. This includes individuals experiencing:

• Depression/ low mood
• Stress/ anxiety
• Issues of identity
• Panic
• Self-esteem
• Relationship difficulties
• Obsessional thinking
• Bereavement
• Difficulties relating to loss, change and transition
• Surviving trauma

Assessment

Prior to embarking on psychotherapy an assessment with Ian would take place. This assessment would establish:

• The nature of the individuals presenting difficulties.
• The individual's expectations of therapy and past experiences of therapy.
• Whether a constructivist psychotherapeutic approach would be the most appropriate intervention.
• The number of sessions to be offered.
• How the progress of therapy would be reviewed.
• Where there are other recommendations as to appropriate interventions this would be clarified at the assessment.
• Provision for online psychotherapy available where considered appropriate.
• Fee structure and payment method.

What is Constructivist Psychotherapy?

Constructivist Psychotherapy starts with the premise that the way in which we experience and come to understand the world in which we live is a unique process, specific to the individual and how they have made sense of these experiences. There is the assumption that a core part of our human endeavours is to anticipate events and situations around us, which are bound to our individual perspectives established throughout our lives and over time. Hence we anticipate events by 'templating' or overlaying on to them constructions that we have developed, these constructions are personal and specific to us.

Constructivist Psychotherapy undoubtedly will need both the client and therapist to jointly establish where the client identifies themselves as being 'psychologically stuck' and the repeating patterns that the client may identify as unhelpful or self-limiting. Such therapy is a joint venture where the therapist is an expert on the theory and the client an expert on themselves (even though it may not always feel so). The therapeutic relationship is built on bringing these two experts together in a therapeutic partnership. It is a respectful and empowering approach where the therapist cannot make assumptions but must enquire and explore with the client. It involves creating a therapeutic space where the client can begin to give meaning to their experiences. It can be considered an optimistic and creative approach that aims to find ways of experimenting with alternative experiences, this being the essence of potential re-construction of ourselves in the world in which we find ourselves. As suggested by George Kelly (1955) it is the future which tantalises us, not the past. We always reach out to the future through the window of the present.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Little Gidding V, T.S. Elliot