Longer-term therapy
Some difficulties are not a discrete problem to be solved. They are a way of experiencing oneself and other people that has been shaped, usually early, and often by something that should not have happened, or things that should have happened and did not.
For that, brief work is frequently not enough. Longer-term psychotherapy is open-ended, usually weekly and sometimes twice weekly, and it goes at the pace the work actually requires.
I practise the Conversational Model.
The Conversational Model
The Conversational Model is a psychodynamic psychotherapy developed for people whose difficulties involve the sense of self rather than a single symptom. It originates in the work of the British psychiatrist Robert Hobson, and was developed and extended in Australia by Russell Meares at the University of Sydney, where it has been taught and researched for four decades.
Its central claim is that a coherent sense of self is not something a person has on their own. It is made between people, in conversation. It can be damaged that way, and it can be rebuilt that way.
Where the difficulty comes from
Trauma that is early, prolonged or relational does not simply leave a memory behind. It disrupts the process by which a person comes to feel real, continuous and their own. What follows is usually described in fragments. Emptiness. Numbness. Watching yourself from outside. Relationships that keep taking the same painful shape. A self that changes depending on who is in the room.
What happens in a session
The work is a conversation, and the attention is on its texture as much as its content - tone, rhythm, imagery, the small breaks in understanding and the repairs that follow.
Two things distinguish it in practice.
The first is what the model calls analogical relatedness: language that stays close to feeling and to the particular, working through image and metaphor rather than explanation. Not "you sound anxious", but the specific picture or phrase that actually fits.
The second is a rhythm of aloneness and togetherness. Neither constant contact nor withdrawal, but a movement between the two. That movement, rather than any single intervention, is understood to be what does the work.
There is no advice, no homework and no symptom checklist. It is slower than a short course of therapy and it goes considerably deeper.
Who it suits
Complex and developmental trauma. Disturbance of self, sometimes given the label borderline personality disorder. Dissociation. Depression and anxiety that have not shifted with shorter therapy or medication. People who have been through several therapies without much changing.
Practical
Assessment usually takes two to three sessions, at the end of which we decide together whether to go ahead. Sessions are fifty minutes, weekly or twice weekly, and the work is open-ended. In person in Byron Bay or by video anywhere in Australia.
Contact
To ask whether this kind of work suits your situation, write or call. I reply within two business days.
0455 494 858