PRICING
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The cost for a 55-minute individual session is £150 and Steve is able to work with all major insurance companies
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A couples session, which lasts 90-minutes, is £225
The full session fee is payable at the time of your appointment and cancellations must be made at least 48 hours ahead of your appointment. If not a full-fee will be charged..
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Individual supervision is £100 per hour and group supervision is £200 per hour.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a form of therapy that focuses on learning varied skills and identifying one’s most important values in order to live a richer, fuller life. The skills component of ACT includes learning a range of mindfulness skills in order to better handle patterns of difficult thoughts and feelings. Mindfulness is a bit of a cultural buzz word at the moment, but it essentially means acting skilfully by turning attention to the present moment of our lives with openness, curiosity and non-judgment. This is a useful approach to our lives as it allows us to step back from patterns of difficult thinking and feeling and not react in our usual rapid, habitual ways - ways which often contribute to our difficulties in life.
ACT has a strong emphasis on identifying our most important values as a means to find direction and meaning in life and to connect to our inner motivation and energy to engage our challenges and lives fully. Both the mindfulness skills and values work are woven together to help people get unstuck from entrenched patterns, while moving towards those things that are most meaningful for them.
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is an effective approach to psychotherapy for a range of mental and emotional health issues, including anxiety and depression. CBT aims to help us to identify and challenge unhelpful thoughts and to learn practical self-help strategies. These strategies are designed to bring about immediate positive changes in your quality of life. CBT can be useful for anyone who needs support to challenge unhelpful thoughts that are preventing them from reaching their goals or living the life they want to live. CBT aims to show us how our thinking affects your mood. It can teach us to think in a less negative way about ourselves and our life. It is based on the understanding that thinking negatively is a habit that, like any other habit, can be broken.
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy
Intensive
Short-Term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
Intensive Short-Term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) is a brief form of psychotherapy, developed by Dr. Habib Davanloo. In ISTDP, the basic theory is that most psychological problems occur due to the emotional effects of disrupted attachments. Interruptions and trauma to human attachments may cause intense feelings that may become blocked and avoided. When things later in life stir up these complex feelings, anxiety and defences may be ‘activated’.
The anxiety and defences may be unconscious to the person experiencing them, and the result is a range of physical and psychological symptoms, and interpersonal issues. Often people with anxiety, depression, substance abuse, somatisation, and eating disorders have this emotional blockage. These unconscious processes can also lead to health problems in bodily systems, including the cardiovascular system, gastrointestinal tract, respiratory system, immune system, and muscular system.
ISTDP is an interactive therapy where both the therapist and client work together to identify the way the person experiences their anxiety and the defences which arise to block the painful feelings from surfacing. When these feelings are experienced, anxiety and defences decrease. They can then see the driving emotional forces that were being defended. Working through the avoided feelings can often bring about symptom improvement, behavioural changes and help to develop healthy relationships.
Open Dialogue is both a way of structuring mental health services to be more responsive to people’s needs, and a philosophical approach to being with people in distress, being in dialogue with the person’s social network. Open Dialogue originated in Finland in the 1980s and has been spreading around the world, partly because the results have been impressive, including much lower rates of medication use and hospitalisation..
In practice, Open Dialogue is structured around ‘network meetings’ which bring together whoever might have a useful perspective on what is happening, usually with at least two Open Dialogue practitioners. In practice, this often means family members, but it can include whoever the person feels would be useful, for example a neighbour, case worker, teacher, or friend. The idea is that there are lots of different perspectives and it can be extremely helpful to talk together, to listen to all of these different perspectives. Most decisions are made in network meetings which allows the conversation to remain open.
