What you can expect
Sarah thinks carefully about all her clients. She takes time to listen and truly understand your struggles, and she believes strongly in collaborating WITH YOU to understand what is at the heart of your current difficulties and what you need from therapy at this time in your life.
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The first session is typically longer, and focussed on understanding you, and your struggles, rather than offering you any specific ways forward.
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Together, we may decide to do some brief work, focussed on giving you skills to cope with intense emotions, or reducing behaviours that get in the way of creating the life you want. We may also choose to do some longer term work together, or 'blocks' of sessions over time, focussed on healing from past traumatic or upsetting life experiences, in order to work toward reduce the impact they have on the life you have today.
Schema Therapy
Schema Therapy is a psychotherapy that aims to help people to recognise longstanding patterns/templates or schemas, which shape how they view themselves, the world or their relationships. It builds awareness of the origins of these patterns, and provides people with with opportunities to change these patterns of thought, emotion, and behaviour. Sarah uses schema therapy to uncover both your challenging life patterns, as well as honouring your strength and resilience in surviving hard times. Schema therapy draws on experiential strategies, which can result in deep and lasting change, at an emotion level, by rescripting early life experiences, and repairing wounds from past trauma. This includes strategies such as chairwork and imagery work, to heal from the early experiences that have shaped our experiences of reality.
Sarah is particulary committed to using imagery rescripting to give people a deeply reparative experience where previous 'talk therapy' has not shifted negative beliefs people have about themselves.
DBT
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy is a behavioural appraoch to therapy, which focusses on helping people who have longstanding difficulties with intense or out of control emotions. The therapy is very practical, and gives you concrete skills and tools to use when you are overwhelmed by emotion. It includes 4 key sets of skills:
Mindfulness: this helps to build regulation, awareness of the build up of emotion and helps you become more present in the here and now.
Distress Tolerance: skills to help you 'ride out' urges to do something you may later regret. These include crisis survival skills and skills to use when you can't change your circumstances but need to sit with intense emotions.
Emotional Regulation: skills to help you identify what you are actually feeling, and why, and then strategies to assist you in changing your emotions.
Interpersonal Effectiveness: skills to help you figure out what you want from your relationships and how to act effectively in your relationships.
EMDR
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is an evidence based treatment approach, that unlocks the brain's capacity to heal from past upsetting events which may be influencing us in the present. It results in deep and lasting change. It can be useful for people who have upsetting memories that still hold a strong emotional charge, despite the event being 'over'. It can also be helpful for people who have deep negative beliefs about themself, which are connected to their past upsetting experiences. For instance, feelings of worthlessness, incompetence, or a felt sense of not being safe, despite being 'actually' safe.
It relies on bilateral stimulation, which is often provided through rapid eye movement or tapping on each side of one's body, whilst following a process of activating upsetting memories with the support of an experienced and qualified therapist. The aim is to shift your core beliefs, and de activate your memories so that the distress connected to your past experiences subsides & more adaptive beliefs form.
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Sarah is also trained in Relationally Integrative EMDR, which combines EMDR with imagery work to give you a felt sense of repair around childhood experiences which have framed your life. Often these are early attachment difficulties with caregivers.