Dr Guy Van de Walle — Psychotherapist & Psychologist | Chelmsford & Online (EN/FR)
Contact: 07475 520419 or
What You Will Experience by Working With Me
This page is intended to give you a concrete sense of what it is like to work with me.
Psychotherapy is not a simple and linear process, and no two sessions are the same. What follows is therefore not a full description, but an outline of what you are most likely to experience in practice.
Investigative Psychotherapy for in-depth work
As a principle, sessions are client-led. You decide what to bring, what to express, what to share, as well as how and when. This may concern how you feel on a given day, emotions linked to recent or more distant experiences, thoughts that arise in the moment, or matters that have been occupying your mind for some time.
My response to what you bring depends on what I perceive to be most needed from a therapeutic point of view at that time.
Sometimes, I may leave you a great deal of space, allowing you to remain with what you are experiencing and to let it unfold in the session. In such moments, I am fully present and attentive, but not necessarily active verbally. More often, however, I will engage with you, and very frequently there will be an exchange.
Overall, I tend to be quite engaged in discussing both your psychological life and the circumstances, relationships, and events that shape it. From the client’s point of view, these exchanges may appear quite unstructured, or even somewhat random. While the process may at times appear open or unstructured, it is not arbitrary. My understanding of what is taking place is continuously informed by a structured and empirically developed framework, which allows me to orient the work and recognise what is significant, without imposing a predefined model onto your experience.
As you move through the terrain of your psychological life, I am able to identify where you are and to help orient the process in directions that allow it to unfold meaningfully and lead somewhere important. Different paths may be taken, but they often lead back to fundamental aspects of human experience.
You can expect me to ask questions that open up the emotional, psychological, and situational landscape in which you are living. At times, this includes looking not only at your own psychology, but also at that of others and of society at large. What I call collective psychology often plays a crucial role in individual experience, yet it remains insufficiently recognised in much therapeutic work. Social and cultural forces do not merely surround our psychological life; they often shape, feed, and structure it.
My accompaniment therefore also involves a form of guidance. This frequently includes identifying and, where appropriate, challenging false assumptions, intellectualisations, and other biases that may enter into the way you describe yourself, your experience, or your life circumstances. Part of the work consists in helping you move towards descriptions that are not only richer and deeper, but also more accurate and valid. This, in turn, allows you to get closer to the meaning of your experience, and to act in your everyday life from a different footing.
This investigative work is supported by a theoretical framework. However, the role of theory requires clarification.
My framework is not something I apply to clients in a rigid or mechanical way. I do not begin with a ready-made model and fit your experience into it. Nor does my work rely on intuition alone.
My understanding of what you bring is continuously informed by a body of theoretical work that I have developed through clinical practice, personal development, and empirical research. This framework provides a structured and reliable basis for understanding psychological life. It is not artificial, and it is not externally imposed. Because it is empirically grounded, it tends to become relevant naturally in the course of the work itself.
In practice, two processes operate together.
On the one hand, my way of engaging with what you bring is immediate and perceptual. I attend closely to what is expressed through your words, your tone, your behaviour, your bodily presence, and the overall atmosphere of what is taking place. I do not proceed primarily by detached reflection or by formal logic. My understanding develops through observation, sensing, and a felt grasp of what is emerging.
On the other hand, this perceptual process is continuously supported by an underlying structure of understanding. My framework helps me recognise patterns, clarify meanings, and locate what is taking place within a broader and more reliable understanding of human psychology. It allows me to orient the work without forcing it.
The framework is therefore not imposed, but always present. It supports the process without constraining it. Theory remains emergent in the sense that it arises from the exploration of your experience and becomes relevant through it. Yet its emergence is made possible by the fact that a coherent and empirically grounded structure of understanding is already there in the background, informing the work.
This gives the process both freedom and solidity. Your experience remains primary. You remain at all times actively involved in the development of meaning and free in how you come to understand and express what you are living through. At the same time, the work does not remain at the level of impression or intuition alone. It is anchored in a form of understanding that is consistent, reliable, and grounded in sustained empirical inquiry.
The result is a way of working that is both open and responsive, and capable of reaching considerable depth. It allows understanding to emerge collaboratively, while also helping stretch familiar conceptions, loosen limiting assumptions, and open new possibilities in how you think, experience, and live.
How do my ways of working compare with the main psychotherapeutic traditions?
The way I work is not defined by adherence to a particular school of thought. The theoretical framework which has emerged as a result of my lifelong commitment to research and personal development is vast and complex. It is also idiosyncratic. This is why the best platform to allow the public, including my clients, to get to know this work are the three books which I am currently writing, and which will present a summary of my life work.
However, it may be helpful to situate it in relation to some of the main therapeutic approaches, as this can clarify what you can expect—and what you should not expect—from working with me.
The differences outlined below are not matters of preference, but reflect underlying differences in how psychological understanding is approached in practice.
The humanistic tradition
Person-centred therapy
My work shares with person-centred therapy a strong respect for autonomy and self-directedness. I actively support and encourage both.
However, it differs in one important respect. I do not assume that clients can, on their own, fully navigate the complexity of their psychological life without guidance. Human psychology is too rich, too complex, and too often unconscious for this to be realistic—particularly at deeper levels.
For this reason, the support of a well-trained and experienced practitioner is often necessary.
Within the landscape of psychotherapeutic theory, my work has the greatest affinity with the humanistic tradition, which includes person-centred, existential, and transpersonal approaches, while remaining distinct from any single model within it.
This broad tradition is characterised by a holistic orientation to human experience, and by a fundamentally positive view of human potential, with an emphasis on agency, development, and growth.
Key figures in humanistic psychology include Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. In the UK, Brian Thorne has also been influential.
At the same time, many practitioners are not in a position to provide such support in a sufficiently accurate way, often due to theoretical limitations or unexamined assumptions. In this context, the cautious stance adopted by Carl Rogers can be understood. At a time when theory was often rigid and dogmatic, it was essential not to interfere with the client’s autonomy.
However, this position also limits the scope of the work. Its effectiveness depends largely on what the client is able to access and express on their own. While this can be deeply valuable, it does not necessarily lead to a thorough exploration or understanding of one’s psychological life.
Left to themselves, clients tend to remain within familiar areas of experience. They rarely reach the deeper layers, where more fundamental issues reside.
Psychodynamic therapy
My approach differs from psychodynamic therapy in how it relates to the past.
While the past can be important, I do not assume that it necessarily holds the key to understanding present experience. As sessions are client-led, you are free to explore your past as much as you wish, and I will accompany you wherever you feel the need to go. However, I will not systematically direct the work towards it unless there is a clear reason to do so.
When I ask about your past, my primary aim is to understand you better—not to search for explanatory causes.
One reason for this is that much of our psychological life is atemporal. It is rooted in fundamental aspects of human nature and the human condition, which are not confined to past events.
Psychodynamic approaches tend to underemphasise these more permanent structures—both those we are born with and those shaped by the social world we inhabit. These often play a more significant role in present experience than distant events, although the past can, of course, be important, particularly in cases of trauma.
I also do not place a central emphasis on defence mechanisms. While they exist and deserve attention, an excessive focus on them reflects a limited view of human psychology—one that sees the individual primarily as an organism defending itself in a hostile environment.
This view, which emerged in the late 19th century, is now outdated. It overstates the role of defence at the expense of other, more central aspects of psychological life.
Cognitive Behavioural therapy (CBT)
Strictly speaking, CBT is not a talking therapy in the traditional sense. It is a task-based approach involving exercises, measurements, and often homework, aimed at identifying and correcting cognitive distortions.
While this can be helpful in certain cases—particularly in strengthening coping mechanisms—it does not, in itself, lead to a deeper understanding of the underlying issues that bring people to therapy.
Some aspects of my work may appear similar, in that I also attend to false assumptions and cognitive biases. However, in my practice, this process is embedded within a broader experiential framework.
The aim is not only to modify thinking, but to transform how one experiences oneself, others, and the world.