“Always Caring”
Alliance Psychotherapy Services
Alliance Psychotherapy Services is named after the therapeutic alliance or relationship; both terms are used interchangeably, and are essential to my work with individuals. Current research indicates the importance of the therapeutic relationship leading to positive treatment outcomes. Please read Therapeutic Alliance and Outcome of Psychotherapy.
The therapeutic relationship between client and psychotherapist is a very important one. Feeling comfortable and secure with your therapist permits honesty and openness to govern therapy sessions and broadens the therapeutic journey. I offer a free 10 minute consultation for those serious about commencing psychotherapy so that they can feel, experience, and see how beneficial our potential work could be. Your mind and body will inform you if there is a therapeutic fit.
I make every effort to make each clinical session comfortable, informative, and collaborative. It is the therapeutic partnership that permits us to work together to identify, manage and ultimately overcome difficulties, eliminate symptoms, and expand your options in life and happiness.
Alliance Psychotherapy Consulting Room
Compassionate Toronto Psychotherapist
The Therapeutic Environment
The therapeutic environment, my office, is a comfortable room resembling a living room more than a professional office. This permits the person to relax and feel at home. One can choose to do face to face therapy where the person sits facing me or one can lie on the couch out of my view.
A psychoanalytic psychotherapy session is usually held once or twice per week usually at a mutually agreed upon time. To maintain confidentiality, a separate waiting room is situated across the hall from the consulting room to prevent clients running into each other and maintains confidentiality and privacy.
A variety of teas and distilled water is offered in the waiting room should you arrive early. I have evening hours and weekend hours to accommodate those who are unable to come during the day.
I offer phone therapy for individuals who because of distance, work scheduling issues, mothers with children, or those with psychological or physical limitations.
How Important is the Therapeutic Relationship?
The essential component of any relationship, be it professional or otherwise, is the ability to trust. To feel understood allows you to work productively through the therapeutic process leading to a positive outcome. We need to experience people, including mental health providers, as sensitive, genuine, caring, and interested.
The skill of the therapist is important in the therapeutic process as to continually help you gain insights and knowledge that will allow for change to occur. Remember feeling comfortable with your therapist will allow you to entrust them with the intimacies that even your closest friends and family don’t know about you.
People commence psychotherapy usually because of some pain or difficulty and I make sure that my clients understand my commitment to them and their well-being.
What does the Therapy Client do?
Psychotherapy is often referred to as the “talking cure”. Psychotherapy may be seen as an exploration of one’s life. As the client talks, he/she reveals the past, present life situation, and future plans. All behaviour is the sum of small learning events that condition and direct one to prescribed thinking and behavioural patterns.
If your past is interfering with your present you cannot effectively learn from new current experiences. If you learned that everyone is a competitor then you will experience everyone as a competitor. If you learned that no one can be trusted then you will looking for others to betray you. We will explore the myths and beliefs you have constructed.
We will use the present to decondition and recondition you from old habitual automatic patterns of thinking and behaving. It is through this examination that one becomes enlightened about their mind, emotions, behaviours and thought patterns.
What does the Therapist do?
My role is to listen carefully in order to understand you. I compassionately encourage you to talk comfortably about your thoughts and feelings. The therapeutic relationship is one of honesty, openness and confidentiality.
I translate your communications into useful information. Handicapped by lack of awareness of unconscious motivations, people can become victimized by emotional reactions and symptoms that inhibit their lives. One of the key factors of therapy is to reveal the unconscious content of a client’s psyche in an effort to alleviate psychological and physiological symptoms.
I work with a number of therapeutic modalities to provide insight-oriented therapy. There is a body of research that supports the efficacy of these approaches. Psychotherapy allows the client to understand mental processes, change behaviours, and lead a fuller, more enjoyable life.
