Most mental health practitioners websites will give you a long list of symptoms and diagnoses that they work with. This list often includes depression, anxiety, trauma and relationship issues. The rationale for this is to help you feel confident that the practitioner understands your challenge and knows how to help you with it. 

The problem with this is that your challenges are unique to you, as everyone is their own unique person. For instance, although depression has a shared cluster of symptoms, one person's depression is not the same as someone else's depression - the causes for each person's depression are unique. Experience and research tells us that the therapeutic relationship is key to getting results, rather than whether the practitioner thinks they are an expert on your symptoms.  That's why its important that you find a counsellor/therapist that feels like a good match for you.

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Common Questions

You offer coaching, counselling, and psychotherapy. What's the difference?

Coaching is usually the most short term. It often works to strengthen someone's already existing strengths or skills to achieve a specific objective. Coaches will often be quite active, and may help motivate or inspire their clients, and may teach new skills or approaches to achieve the objective.

Counselling works with the client's emotional or psychological difficulties, and may include the application of specific skills to help a client experience emotional releases and gain new perspectives. Counselling may be more prolonged and have more emotional depth than coaching, but does not generally have the depth of psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy usually means some form of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Whether brief or long in duration, psychodynamic psychotherapy works with problematic unconscious processes including those that relate back to childhood. There is good evidence that psychodynamic psychotherapy produces the most long lasting benefits out of different psychological interventions.

For brevity on this site we often talk about psychotherapy, but like many clinicians we may use a blend of these three ways of working. 


How do I find the right therapist for me?

The best way to tell is to shop around, and by that I mean not only visit different therapist's websites or ask for recommendations, but actually meeting with a therapist for an initial session. If it makes you feel more comfortable you might want to tell the therapist even before meeting that it is your intention to try a few different therapists before making a decision. 

Meeting in person is the best way to tell if you feel like you can form a trusting emotional connection with that therapist. At Lucid we understand that choosing a therapist can be difficult, and want to encourage people to find the right therapist for them. If you meet with one of us, and decide we're not the right match for you, then you may still have benefited because we're happy to use that initial experience of meeting you to refer you to someone who might be right for you. 

What happens in the therapy process?

Once somebody contacts us at Lucid, we usually have a brief phone conversation to answer any questions they may have, and then make a time for an initial appointment to meet in person. The initial appointment is a chance for the client to decide if they connect with and trust the therapist enough to work with them, and also if they think the therapist has the skill and understanding to help them with the issue they would like to address. 

The first 1-3 sessions are usually an initial exploration, in which therapist and client have not yet made a commitment to working together. Significant shifts can however happen in this time, and a sense of emotional connection between therapist and client that is hopefully experienced during this time is a good predictor of how beneficial the therapy will be overall.

Once the counsellor and client have agreed to work together, the process of therapy begins. The agreed time-span may be brief or open ended. Usually the process involves revisiting  problematic patterns repeatedly, with different insights or experiences of that pattern each time it is revisited. The therapist is usually particularly alert to moments when the client's problematic pattern expresses itself in the therapy session itself, or in the relationship between client and therapist. This is a powerful opportunity to work with the therapist in that moment when the problematic pattern is manifesting, and to do something different.

Eventually the client is satisfied that they have done the psychological work that they need to do, and in discussion with the therapist, agree to a timetable for finishing. Attention is given to the importance of ending well, in a way that supports the positive changes that the client has made, and that honors the client-therapist relationship that has developed.

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