I provide a safe and confidential space and a time dedicated entirely to you.

With an Individual client, we usually meet once a week for a 50 minute session. With a Couple, we usually meet fortnightly for a 80 minute session. With a Group, we meet once a week for a 110 minute session.

After an initial exploration of the issues or challenges you face, we will agree our Therapeutic Contract. This is to give us an initial focus which we will review it from time to time and refine/amend it as the focus of our work changes.

We work together with the aim of enabling you to manage your issues and challenges more satisfactorily. Sometimes we might decide to go further and look at the developmental aspect of your issues or challenges from a variety of perspectives.

I am not an adviser - you decide what to explore and your goals, you own the awareness that emerges from our work together, you own your decisions. 

My responsibility to you is to be with you as the psychotherapeutic process unfolds, and create opportunities for healing within the therapeutic relationship.

Your responsibility to me as client(s) (and to yourself/selves!) is to commit to attend all our scheduled sessions.

Our joint responsibility is to respect the boundaries of the therapeutic process.

I am respectful, non judgmental, impartial, compassionate, and aim to deeply understand and relate your personal struggle, challenges and desire to improve, with the aim of letting your authentic self emerge so that you can establish a more autonomous and fulfilling way of being. 

At times, for example, when facing beliefs that prevent your thinking being as effective as it could be, and if I consider it therapeutically appropriate, I might decide to respectfully challenge you with an intensity you can safely tolerate.

We explore your specific intra-personal patterns that make you see/feel yourself, others and the world in the way you do. Also inter-personal patterns of relating are explored. These patterns - formed at a time when they had an adaptive and protective function - might be outdated, or even inappropriate to your current life, and limit your self-development, your ability to relate, and ultimately affect the quality of your life and usually also the lives of those close to you and possibly others.

Inevitably, at some point in our sessions, ineffective interpersonal dynamics that underpin your discomfort will emerge between us. We will have a chance to respond in a novel reparative and healing way. Or maybe we will get caught in it and it will be up to us to acknowledge each others contribution to such co-created experience and work through it - you can think of therapy as a sandbox where you can be yourself, experience healing responses and develop new relational options in your interpersonal world and novel more genuine ways of feeling and thinking about yourself.  

Whilst exploring the past can help understanding what happened and its consequences on the current life, knowing and understanding on their own are usually not enough to heal. Healing has a chance to happen by experiencing the present moment as it unfolds within a safe, authentic, and compassionate therapeutic relationship. This relational container creates the conditions for a number of options alternative to the usual autonomic way of responding and relating to emerge. Novel ways of responding can lead to different relational outcomes that make one feel understood, valued, and respected at the core of one self. That’s one of the ways healing happens.

If you want to know more about  the  Values, Principles and Moral Qualities I abide to, please click below

“Like a filing cabinet, the past is a resource of information for learning, but it is not a place to live.“ - Anonymous

“It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.” - D.W. Winnicott

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” - Leonard Cohen

“Your trauma might or might not have started with you, but it could end with you” - unknown

“I am not defined by my scars, but by the incredible ability to heal.” - Lemn Sissay

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” - Rumi

“And suddenly you realize that silence Has the face of the things you've lost” - translation from “La voce del Silenzio”, Paolo Limiti and Mogol

“I go out looking for You and find You coming towards me.” - Yehudah Halevi

“It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather the security of any one particular difference.” - Audre Lorde

Only for clients who contact me via this website, I offer an initial complimentary 20 minute consultation.

W  -  click here for the online contact form

T  -  07803049039

E  -  Paolo@presentingpast.co.uk