Psychotherapy tailored to your needs.
Integrative Psychotherapy is a holistic approach to psychological healing that tailors the treatment to your unique needs rather than forcing you to fit into a pre-existing treatment protocol. It draws on theories and techniques from several models of psychotherapy to develop a treatment that meets the unique needs of individual patients. The human mind is more complex than the models that seek to represent it. Patients shouldn’t have to adapt themselves to a particular form of psychotherapy. Instead, psychotherapy ought to adapt itself to the unique features of individual minds!
My Services – An Overview
Counselling
Counselling is helpful for relatively simple problems of living. These may be personal and emotional, vocational or career-related. Counselling is a way to work through these problems with a skilled-listener and helper.
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is better suited than counselling to treating serious mental suffering. Depression, anxiety, trauma, personality disorders, etc. are labels for more serious forms of mental suffering that require deeper and more sustained approaches to treatment than counselling can provide. This is the work of psychotherapy.
Couples/Relationship Counselling
Sometimes we find ourselves in relationships that we know aren’t good for us, at other times we find ourselves in relationships that we ought to feel extremely grateful for, but which we we are ruining with compulsive, negative behaviours. Relationship counselling is a way to work through these problems together–with the support of a professional helper.
Coaching
Coaching, unlike counselling and psychotherapy, is not about relieving mental suffering, but rather about the optimisation of the self: at work, in love, in oneself. The work of coaching aims beyond the alleviation of mental suffering to individual self-actualisation and the realisation of human flourishing.
Reasons to work with me
Expand your Mind
Learn to take your own mind seriously. Your mind, like your body, deserves care and nourishment. Ensure you have good thinking tools at your disposal. Become curious about yourself: where you have come from and where you are going. See how your life as a part of a greater reality. Let me help you become curious. Let me offer you the tools and resources to become an intrepid explorer of your own inner world.
Deepen your Feelings
Mental flourishing is not about feeling less, it is about developing the capacity to feel more: more deeply and more keenly. Too often we are taught to ignore our feelings, that emotions are a sign of weakness, that sensitivity is an affliction. . . . Healing begins when get in touch with our deepest feelings, thereby becoming a fuller, more integrated, versions of ourselves.
Listen to your Body
People tend to neglect their bodies in one of two ways: either by expecting to little from it (a lack of meaningful physical activity), or by expecting too much from it (over-exercise, overwork, inadequate sleep, substance abuse, overeating, etc.). By working with me me you learn to appreciate the body as the foundation of your being in the world—something deserving of your care and esteem.
Strengthen Your Relationships
The health of your relationships is often a sign of the health of your internal world. This is because our internal world is largely shaped and developed from outside to inside: our early relationships with significant others (usually parents, but sometimes other primary caregivers) often serve as templates for later significant relationships with friends, lovers, colleagues and our own children. And this is because our relationships also serve as templates for our relationships with ourselves: our sense of self-worth, importance to others, capacity as agents. This is also why counselling and psychotherapy are seen by some as offering a cure through relationship.
About me
Joshua Comyn, PhD
In addition to being a practitioner of psychotherapy in private practice, I have also worked as a lecturer in counselling and psychotherapy where I have taught and trained students to become psychotherapists and counsellors. Prior to studying and working in psychotherapy, my background was in literature, philosophy and theatre and I have worked as an academic at several universities in Australia. This experience gives me a broad view of how the mind works and influences how I understand the theory and practice of psychotherapy. Literature provides a window into other minds, and philosophy is a powerful way to organise one’s own mind. Theatre has taught me how to connect with others and myself and how to make the body a vehicle for the mind’s expression.