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.