THERAPY METHODS

PSYCHOANALYSIS

PSYCHOANALYSIS is a 'subjective analytic' method:
Practiced through 'talk therapy' sessions, it analyses the personal, individual (subjective) mindset and influences that drive you, your thoughts and your behavior.

PSYCHOANALYSIS explains the human psyche as an interaction of three components:

"ID" (from Latin: it/this) is the subconscious influence of our instinctive drives and urges, our essential human needs and desires;
the "SUPER-EGO" (from Latin: above/over Me, the Super me) is the subconscious influence of the cultural rules, ideals and values we've integrated, from society and from our parental upbringing;
and the "EGO" (Latin: I /Me) is the conscious operator that has to mediate between the two others, to think and make practical decisions. As our conscious "pilot", the EGO constantly has to compromise between what we feel we want ("ID"/desires), and what we believe we should do ("SUPER-EGO"/rules).

We live a happy life when we operate those compromises all right.

But when some of these "internal conflicts" are not well resolved, it creates psychological symptoms in our life (like stress, anxiety, depression, or any type of neurosis), as the result of an emotional imbalance and repressed feelings.

The Psychoanalyst helps you to find out what are the unconscious factors that create the tensions in your mind, in order to bring them forward to your awareness: then you'll have a more self-aware, conscious and powerful Ego to make better choices in your life, and clear off the repressed feelings that caused anxiety.
The more conscious you'll become through Psychoanalysis, the less you'll be a victim of unconscious, invisible influences, and the more easily you'll reach your true goals instead. That's what I call 'empowering' you: it's bringing you more control and power over your own decisions.
To quote Carl G. Jung (one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis) : “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it Fate."

COGNITIVE THERAPY

Cognition (from Latin: cognitio = I know, I get to know, I perceive...) is the process of knowledge, the way we learn, think and process ideas.

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY analyses the construction of our ideas, the process of our thoughts and feelings, the logic of our reasoning. It explains that each one us has built their own (personal) system of interpretations and knowledge, based on one's individual experience, to perceive/understand oneself, others, and the world around. Thus our thoughts are often subjective (relative), and don't necessarily correspond to an objective truth.

When some of your repetitive thoughts or feelings appear to be particularly negative and cause troubles in your life (ex: anxiety, depression, negative voices, self-doubt, self-hate, obsession, fears, insecurities, trust issues, etc), COGNITIVE THERAPY will focus on rationally analyze your thoughts mechanisms and patterns. As an 'objective analytical' therapy method, it will evaluate the dysfunctional systems of thoughts you've unconsciously elaborated (maladaptive schemas), that create "negative bias" on your experience of reality.
Then with many instructive methods and exercises, it will help you to stop the wrong reasoning, the negative chains of thoughts, and update them with more logic and accurate perceptions, that will lead to more positive results in your life.

BEHAVIORAL THERAPY

BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY explains that our behaviours (the things we do, the ways we act in our life) express as the results of a conditioning: since our younger age, we've been facing individual experiences, and have unconsciously made a subjective interpretation of them, that orientated us to react and respond to them in one particular way.
And by repeating the practice of those responses to any similar situation throughout our life, we've reinforced the pattern, and fixed it as a natural behaviour.

So, when 1 behaviour causes troubles in your life now (ex: a compulsive addiction, OCD, smoking, drinking, drugs, anger problems, jealousy, love or sex addiction, social phobia, any particular fear, etc), BEHAVIORAL THERAPY helps you to identify, analyze and understand the complete construction, the function and the process of this behavior, with 2 goals: de-condition the maladaptive pattern that triggers negative effects in your life, and implement instead a new alternative response, that will bring you positive effects.
The therapy helps you to un-learn the negative behavior, and re-learn a new positive behavior to substitute.
Like a "re-programming" of your software, with new updates to fix the bugs!

It is an 'objective analytic' therapy method: we focus on the behavior as the object of the therapy, with a rational analysis and practical methods, to bring effective solutions to your problem.

I explained these 3 main approaches as they are the fundamental basis of psychological treatment, but I also practice and implement the specificities of many other derivative methods, adapted for special cases, such as: Systemic therapy (for couple or family counseling), Transactional analysis, Psychogenealogy, Art therapy, Hypnotherapy, Psycho corporal therapy (a.k.a. mind-body), and Gestalt therapy.