Discover The Unconscious Forces Shaping Your Life
Who Does Psychotherapy?
- Usually you start psychotherapy because you are struggling with some aspect of your life.
- People from all walks of life benefit from psychotherapy.
- You don’t need any special knowledge to benefit, and your own experience of psychotherapy will be unique.
- It is not necessary to have something wrong with you.
- If you are interested in yourself as a person, you will be able to engage with psychotherapy.
- I work with you as a person, whatever your diagnosis or difficulties.
- Perhaps you simply want a greater sense of aliveness, to understand yourself better, to feel more ‘human’.
- The reasons you gave yourself for beginning psychotherapy may turn out not to be so important.
Do You Suffer From:
-
- ✓ Depression?
- ✓ Anxiety?
- ✓ Grief?
- ✓ Trauma?
Do You Struggle With:
-
- ✓ Relationships?
- ✓ Feeling lost?
- ✓ Addiction?
- ✓ Food?
Do You Want More:
-
- ✓ Creativity?
- ✓ Freedom?
- ✓ Aliveness?
- ✓ Intimacy?
My name is Crispin Balfour and my practice is grounded in psychoanalysis, as "... still the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind." (Eric Kandel, Neuroscientist and Nobel Prize Winner)
What Happens In Psychotherapy?
To begin with, we will make time to have an extended conversation over a couple of hours, to think about what you need and whether psychotherapy is the best option.Then we might make times to meet together regularly over an extended period and for an agreed fee. Our meetings become something you can rely on and "lean into".
I allow you to set the agenda, and avoid imposing my own view. Sometimes this might make you anxious, but this is something we can think about together.
I listen carefully to what you have to say and how you are saying it, reading between the lines, as it were, for what is not spoken.
How Does Psychotherapy Work?
Your mental and emotional health has laid down on what was inborn from birth by a course of development, both internal and through emotional contacts with external reality.Patterns are formed and, although your mind, brain and personality remain extraordinarily plastic, once these patterns are unconscious, they can be hard to change - making your personality rigid in ways that are difficult and painful.
Psychotherapy uses the relationship between us to investigate the structure of your personality. Together we are able to make use of our remarkably human ability to allow one thing to stand for another, and over time you can make use of psychotherapy to radically transform yourself.
Psychotherapy Offers You The Opportunity To Become More Fully Human Than You Have Been Able To Achieve Up To This Point In Your Life
"The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied."(Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams)
This Is Me
Crispin Balfour
Feedback from a former member of a group
“It was an invaluable experience for me, facing in the present my responses to past family dynamics and learning how to negotiate with others, working through my own issues at my own pace. It was about learning to accept myself for who I am”13 September 2008
Feedback from a former member of a group.
"I think about the group often, sometimes consciously drawing on specific things I learned, sometimes just knowing that my time with you all changed me in ways that are hard to identify but have definitely left me a fuller and more wholehearted being. I am deeply grateful"18th May 2010
Feedback From Lynne Holdem Psychotherapist
"Crispin is an insightful and thoughtful psychotherapist. He doesn't jump to conclusions or go with the surface of a communication. He gives a patient space to feel and think and get to know him or herself within a safe therapeutic container. Crispin is always thinking and reading and working at becoming better at what he does. He also conducts small groups that help people become themselves while learning to relate to others. I have known Crispin for a long time and worked with him in groups and in peer supervision."7th November 2010
Feedback From Meg Carbonatto Psychotherapist ,
"Crispin is a highly insightful, bold therapist, willing to challenge what needs to be confronted. I appreciate his honesty and candour."16th April 2013
Psychotherapy Offers You Different Perspectives . . .
La Distancia
"The distance between us
is holy ground
to be traversed
feet bare
hands raised in joyous dance
so that once it is crossed
the tracks of our pilgrimage
shine in the darkness
and light our coming together
in a bright and steady light."
Rafael Jesus Gonzalez 1995