My name is Panos, and I am a Chartered Counselling Psychologist. I offer open-ended, long- term psychoanalytic and integrative psychological therapy (evidence-based) to adults. My aim is to provide a confidential space where you can share and process your experiences without fear or shame. I will listen to you very carefully and together we will examine the origins of your difficulties, what keeps them going, and how you want to address them.
I work with individuals who wish to engage in a systematic examination of their experiences, who are not satisfied with easy, ready-made answers and who want to reflect on their experiences and arrive at their own conclusions, solutions, and resolutions rather than just manage their symptoms.
WHEN TO START THERAPY
The moment you start thinking about addressing your concerns is the right moment to start therapy. The engine of a useful therapy is your desire to understand something new about yourself, your relationships, your enjoyment and your suffering. Thinking that being in therapy is a sign of weakness or an indulgence might put you off an otherwise vital and productive endeavour. Change can be daunting or terrifying, but it does not have to always be.
You may be going through burnout, relational problems, a lack of drive, anxiety, stress, feelings of failure, powerlessness, guilt or shame, loneliness, loss, or have been a victim of injustice, discrimination, trauma or abuse, or feeling stuck. When you struggle with repeating patterns that do not seem to serve you, or with acceptance and loss, or when you are no longer at peace or content with what you thought was ideal, then it is time for therapy.
WHY THERAPY?
Therapy will help you explore and address your experience of - and potentially your role in - ambiguity and impasse in your life. In therapy you will have a chance to clarify your own truths, which can be sometimes uncomfortable or inconvenient, while rethinking potentially imposed and limiting “shoulds”. Therapy offers a space to explore where things may have taken a turn—and how your fears, desires, or symptoms may be speaking in ways not yet fully heard.
Therapy can help us come to terms with the possibility that the old ways are not working for us anymore and thus become ready for something new. Therapy can also help us come to terms with what no longer works—and with what may never change.
THE PROCESS
Suffering can be found in many different forms. Diagnoses and one-size-fits-all-therapy protocols can be helpful, but focusing on your individual experience can lead to more meaningful, personal and lasting change.
In the first few sessions we will discuss about your circumstances and what changes you wish to make. I will listen to you, ask you questions, help you clarify your thoughts and highlight potentially important, if not unconscious, links between different parts of your life. If we then decide to continue working together, I can then help you examine what seems to be at the core of your difficulties and how to move forward. The process may involve thinking and saying something that has never been said before, challenging assumptions and entrenched beliefs, staying with difficult thoughts and emotions, and examining actions that are not necessarily rational.
If therapy goes well, it can be a challenging journey that it is driven by how deep you wish to go in finding new ways to relate, and to enjoy. Arriving at conclusions can be useful, and arriving at the proper questions can be just as important: open questions that unsettle, provoke, or finally let something shift.
49 Queen Victoria St, London EC4N 4SA
The building door is a big wooden one – once there, please ring “Reception” and make your way to the first floor reception area (before 5 pm) or you can message me
(from 5 pm onwards) so I can come and collect you.
My therapy room itself is on the second floor.
I am a qualified Counselling Psychologist specialising in psychodynamic/psychoanalytic therapy and in cognitive behavioural therapy. My practice is integrative and evidence-based. I work with adults (18+) and can offer sessions in English and in Greek.
Training and Qualifications
I finished my undergraduate degree in Psychology in The American College of Greece in 2011, where I practiced as an assistant psychologist for the Dromokaition Psychosis Psychiatric Team.
During my Doctorate in Counselling Psychology at City University London, I practiced in the charity sector and in an NHS Drug and Alcohol service.
I became qualified in 2015 and promptly after started working for primary, secondary and specialist NHS services. I had the honour of working with people from various walks of life and have significant clinical experience with acute and chronic psychological distress, such as anxiety, mood, personality and eating difficulties, as well as complex trauma and psychosis. Around the time of COVID I worked briefly as Head of Clinical Services and senior supervisor for a private counselling service. I had the privilege of supervising clinical trainees and helping them exercise their passion for the work, and helped expand access to psychological therapy services for the public.
I started my private practice in 2017 where I focused on psychoanalytic therapy. I strongly believe that there is a need to focus more on unconscious processes and how these impact our relationship to important others and to our selves, our meaning-making, our enjoyment and our suffering.
Therapy can be viewed as a mix of two aims, or processes, one of recovery and one of discovery. The difference lies in how they approach suffering, love, hope, or meaning – and what may be missing. Recovery helps us claim back what we lost, and discovery invites us the question these losses, and challenge our personal myths. Recovery invites meaning from outside, and discovery challenges the meaning that is already inside. Recovery asks "how can I do things right?” while discovery asks “what do I mean by "right"?”. At different points in our lives we need our therapy to err more on one side rather than on the other.
In my practice I give priority to discovery but I also appreciate the immediateness of recovery. The reason that I as a practitioner prioritise discovery is that it allows for a broader perspective, and for raising useful, if not difficult questions, and aims to address long-term, repeated problems and suffering. At the end of the day, it is the subjective experience of the client that takes centre stage.
– Inspired by P. Verhaeghe and A. Kullman
Health and Care Professions Council - Practitioner Psychologist.
British Psychological Society - Chartered Counselling Psychologist.
British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies - Cognitive
Behavioural Psychotherapist.
International Neuropsychoanalysis Society - Clinical Fellow.
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