Can Psychotherapy Help You?
"Psychodynamic Psychotherapy-a space to think, and a treatment for depresion, anxiety and emotional difficulties
Welcome.
Hello, my name is Paul Salvage and I am a UKCP registered Psychodynamic Psychotherapist, working from my private consulting room in The Drive, Hove, and from Brighton Therapy Centre on New Road. I qualified with an MSc in Psychotherapy from the University of Brighton in 2014.
I am also a qualified supervisor with a Diploma in Supervision from the SAP.
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy.
A human life is complicated and most people will experience some form of anxiety, depression, or emotional distress during its course. When these feelings start to feel overwhelming, psychotherapy offers a unique, confidential space to begin making sense of them.
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy originated with Freud, and has since developed a large body of thought, which makes use of Freuds insights but is not uncritical of them. Contemporary Psychodynamic or analytic Psychotherapy is multi-disciplinary, incorporating findings from attachment theory, neuroscience, Psychology and other therapeutic modalities and evidence based findings.
2023
Supervision Qualification-Society of Analytic Psychology.
2016
Functional Family Therapy – Youth Offending Service.
2014
MSc in Psychotherapy.-University Of Brighton.
2009 I
Integrative Counselling with Mindfulness - Centre for Mindfulness Based Education.
Since 2014
UKCP Registered (2011164259). Fully DBS Cleared.
The Psychodynamic Approach.
01
Deep Listening
I listen carefully to the experiences you share and think carefully with you about how these are affecting you - both consciously and unconsciously. Creating a reflective space where we can both work at understanding your experiences, past and present and how these are affecting you.
02
The Unconcious
Core experiences and beliefs can be ‘unconscious but operational’, driving us in ways that aren’t understood. Understanding these helps alter their influence. However, because they are unconcious they are not usually clear or accessible, over time and within a relationship that developes enough trust, these start to become accessible.
Working Together
The therapeutic relationship offers a unique opportunity to speak and be heard in a way that allows previously guarded against thoughts or experiences to be articulated. Patterns that ocur in other relationships can present themselves and be able to be approached in helpfull and potentially new ways.
Areas I Can Help With
Please click on any heading for further information.
Anxiety is often caused by both external and internal difficulties - challenging situations, behind anxieties are often experiences of loss, abandonment, rejection and being misunderstood.
Sadness, despair, hopelessness, irritability and instability. Psychotherapy provides a unique and confidential space to experience and understand these feelings.
Sometimes we can find ourselves unconciouslyrepeating self-destructive behaviours even though they limit us . This can be a painful experience and is often defended against, as it can be felt as a terrible blow to our self-esteem and the idea of who we think we are. Therapy can be a safe place to investigate these.
Loneliness, intimacy difficulties, repeating destructive patterns. The therapeutic relationship, can provide a way to explore these in a way that can understand and shine lights on the structures that underlie these patterns.
We numb ourselves for all sorts of reasons, but this brings only temporary relief. Often, we attach to something that, although harmful, is at least reliable and effective. Therapy for addictions can be complex as it can get in the way of insight and progress. However, if there is a real willingness to go beyond the numbing behaviour, it can really help to understand what the nature of the pain is that is being numbed. Other treatments may need to be considered alongside therapy if the addiction is severe.
This can be brought about by unexpected changes and challenges. Burn-out, heartbreak, retirement, abuse, loss and identity crisis. These require a thoughtful non-judgmental space where these unexpected challenges to our sense of self can be processed and new ways of being created.
Experiences of trauma, abuse, and/or neglect can be overwhelming and damaging. These experiences have been ‘too much’ to process and instead have been boxed away. At the time this may of been absolutely necessary for psychic survival, but can create problems down the line. The mutual creation of a safe therapeutic can create a space where these experiences be thought about, and processed slowly ‘unboxing’, these painful sometimes unconsciously stored experiences. Trauma can be big T trauma, where there have been significant events tor experiences that have been disturbing and overwhelming or little T trauma, where cumulative experiences of neglect or unavailability have built up and had a profound effect.
Often we know we need to make changes but remain stuck in old patterns. These old ways need to be understood, as well as the imagining and implementation of new ways and paths forward.
Sometimes we just need the supportive space of an hour a week to unburden ourselves to meet the challenges of our lives. Work, relationships, friendships, parenting, and family dilemmas can all be helped by the calm thinking space of therapy, enabling us to bear the burden of our own responsibilities.
Finding out who we are, our true voice when we are often crowded out by so many competing ideas or influences can be essential in living a life of authenticity.
Therapists are required to have their own therapy to experience being a patient. This inevitably illuminates the therapist’s own complexes in this difficult work. As is often stated, we can only take out patients/clients as far as we have gone ourselves
I am a qualified Supervisor qualifying through The Society of Analytic Psychology, which is a Jungian orientated training institute. This has informed my Psychodynamic thinking and my main approach to Supervision is to explore the experience of both therapist and patient as they create the treatment together.
Adolescents 16-25
I have been evolving my work as a Psychotherapist with Adolescents for some time now.
Adolescence is a time of intensity and potential creativity, conflicts between dependency and independence, loss of childhood, emerging sexuality, peer group dynamics, reckoning with past family difficulties and the development of values whilst also trying to make sense of a complex changing world. These make it a heady phase to negotiate. Today adolescence can be an almost permanent state of being, with confusion around responsibility and vagueness about the transition to adulthood. Adolescent states of mind and behaviours can continue well into adulthood. My aim in working with teenagers (15 +) is to create a calm confidential space where there can be a space to think and process all of this.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
― C.G. Jung
FAQs, room and fees
Initially we may speak by phone or via email and can arrange an initial consultation. In this initial meeting I will invite you to tell me about what is going on for you and seek to get a general understanding of you and your history. It is also a chance for us to meet, for you to get sense of me and to see if we would be a good ‘fit’. We may agree to work together and or to have another preliminary meeting or we may think about other approaches that may beneficial. There is no commitment to continue from this meeting.
If we agree to commence therapy, we will agree a day and time to meet weekly, either once a week or twice a week. We may agree to work for a set amount of time, a few months or work more openly deciding as we go what is most beneficial.
I do charge for missed sessions as that time will have been put aside exclusively for your use, however of possible I will try and offer an alternative time in the same week. I don’t charge if I am away.
My standard fee is £75 although I do offer some lower cost places for those on low incomes. I do charge for initial consultations.
I work from my own private consulting room in The Drive in Hove and from Brighton Therapy Centre on New Road in Brighton.
Get in Touch
