Dr Guy Van de Walle, Psychotherapist & Psychologist
Contact me on 07475 520419 or Message me
What a session with me looks like
This page aims to give you a concrete feel of the type of service and experience that I offer to my clients. Please bear in mind that psychotherapy and personal development are complex and non linear processes. Therefore, my purpose here is not to give a full and precise description of what goes on in therapy. Rather, it is to convey some aspects which are important and frequently encountered.
Investigative Psychotherapy for in-depth work
As a principle, all sessions are client led. You decide what to bring, what to express, what to share, as well as how and when. This can be how you feel on the day, the feelings which you carry with you from recent or distant past, or thoughts that come to your mind or which have been on your mind. My response to you will depend on what I perceive that you need or require most at that time from a therapeutic perspective. Sometimes, I will leave you all the space, allowing you to experience whatever you need to experience during the session(s). I will be there, present and attentive, but not actively engaged verbally. More often than not, I will offer a certain level of interaction. Very frequently, there will be an exchange.
Overall, I tend to be quite engaged with my clients in discussing their psychological life, and their life circumstances and events. From the client’s point of view, these exchanges will appear quite unstructured, even random.
But this should not be a concern. As you navigate the seas of your psychological life, I can pin point exactly where you are and I will help you stir in directions which allow your journey to unfold and eventually lead to somewhere important. Somehow, in psychology, all roads eventually lead to Rome, that is to the fundamentals of psychological life.
How you get there matters a great deal, and I am there to accompany you and make the journey both educational and cathartic. Expect me to ask questions which open up the emotional and mental landscape which surrounds you, sometimes literally, as we look at both your psychology and that of others, including that of society at large - an aspect of things on which most therapists are usually weak, if not totally unequipped, even though so-called cultural aspects or, as I prefer, collective psychology, play a crucial role in our individual psychological life by interacting with it or simply by feeding it and contributing to many of its aspects. My accompaniment is therefore also a form of guidance, which frequently entails identifying and challenging false assumptions, intellectualisations and other biases which find their way in your comments and narratives. I help you get closer to rich and deep as well as valid and accurate descriptions and renditions of your experiences, which allow you to get closer to their meaning, and indeed their full and true meaning. Doing this, in turn, allows you to engage into action on a new footing in the context of your everyday life.
How do my ways of working compare with the main psychotherapeutic traditions?
Person-centred therapy
Contrary to person-centred therapists, I do not expect you to find your way forward, overcome your issues and/or develop as a person without any help and guidance coming from me. Like person-centred therapists, I highly value client autonomy and self-directedness, and I do everything not only to respect them but also to encourage them. However, I do not see you as an expert or potential expert capable of taking complete charge of your personal growth. Very few people are able to do that. Human psychology is far too rich, complex and often unconscious as well as generally misunderstood and unknown for the average person to find their way on their own through all the intricacies of their psychological life and make sense of them, especially where the fundamentals of human psychology are concerned. The help and support of a well trained and experienced specialist is required.
Now, it is true that very few “specialists” can provide such help in an effective and appropriate manner, that is without introducing their own biases stemming from immature and clumsy theories or other societal and personal misconceptions. This is why the conservative posture originally adopted by Carl Rogers, the creator of person-centred therapy, at a time and in a context where theory tended to be artificial, dogmatic and oppressive, can be seen as a prudent one, as it is paramount not to interfere with client autonomy and self-directedness. But it is also a stance which imposes great limitations on itself. Its effectiveness only extends as far as the client feels empowered - sometimes for the first time - by the opportunity to be listened to and use their voice to express and explore elements of their own psychological life, even though many of these elements will remain unseen and unexamined through this process. Left to their own devices, clients usually only venture on the familiar shores and shallow waters of their psychological life, they rarely get into the real depths of it. There are real benefits to this approach, as I could verify myself. One of my best personal experience of therapy was precisely with a therapist who gave me love at a time in my life when I was terribly hard on myself and self loathing. Her love and kindness felt like pure bliss and they were very therapeutic indeed. However, this experience of therapy remained limited because it never allowed me to explore the meaning of my life experiences.
Psychodynamic therapy
Contrary to psychodynamic therapists, I do not expect my clients to systematically delve into their past, as if it was holding the key to their psychological life. More often than not, it does not. As all sessions are client led, it goes without saying that my clients are allowed to talk about their past and explore it as much as they want, including their childhood. I have no objection to that, if this is what they feel the need to do. However, while I will accompany my clients wherever they feel like going, I will not take them there myself unless I see a good reason for doing so. Of course, I will ask questions about their past, but by doing so my primary aim will only be to get to know them better, not to search elusive causes of their issues or their personality structure. The reason for this is that the general background of our psychological life is atemporal, as it is made of the constituents of human nature and the human condition.
Psychodynamic theory tends to neglect permanent psychological structures, both those with which we were born (we are not a blank slate at birth, far from that) and those which come from the world (namely society) in which we live and to which we belong. These permanent features of our psychological life usually play a more important role than our distant past in our current or recent experiences, even though, of course, the past cannot be neglected and, in some cases, requires a lot of attention. This is particularly true where past events caused major trauma or impacted one’s life in some important way(s).
Contrary to psychodynamic therapists, I do not place an emphasis on defence mechanisms either. This excessive focus on one particular aspect of our psychological life comes from an inaccurate picture of what makes a human being, considered as an animal or organism which fends for its life in a hostile environment. This is a view which was popular in the late 19th century when psychoanalysis took off, and which should be considered obsolete. It is not true that we spend our time defending ourselves or that our psychological issues primarily stem from the detrimental influence of our defence mechanisms, even though it is true that these cannot be ignored. Indeed, they are necessary and they often require attention, so that they can be improved. But it is not the same thing to take into account a particular aspect of human psychology and to put an excessive emphasis on it to the detriment of others which are far more important.
Cognitive Behavioural therapy (CBT)
The decision by the NHS to make Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, or CBT, its therapy of choice has contributed to its misrepresentation. Nowadays, CBT is frequently seen as the panacea. In reality, its institutional recognition primarily rests on its cost-effectiveness (6 weeks treatments done by quickly trained and low paid CBT practitioners) and its ability to fit within the main paradigm of modern western medicine, which mostly focuses on symptoms rather than on the causes or roots of a problem. From this point of view, the use of the term “Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy” is misleading. CBT is not a "therapy", as frequently acknowledged by CBT practitioners themselves.
Task-based, CBT entails performing a series of exercises and undergoing measurements under the guidance and supervision of a qualified practitioner. The aim of these exercises and measurements, which usually involve homework, is to identify cognitive biases and distortions in the individual’s conscious cognitive apparatus, with a view to correct them. By bringing the individual to a supposedly more realistic view of their everyday life, it is hoped that some of the individual’s negative tendencies, which generally find an ideal breeding ground in distorted ways of thinking, can be reduced or removed to improve feelings and behaviour.
CBT is not a “talking therapy” and, as such, does not belong to the realm of psychotherapeutic approaches, although it is often placed amongst these, wrongly. Indeed, it does not entail facilitating the expression and exploration of the individual’s verbalised thoughts and feelings with a view to gain a better understanding of their existential issues. While CBT allows in some cases to reinforce the individual’s superficial coping mechanisms, which explains why some people find it helpful, it does not allow them to deal with what causes them to seek therapy in the first place.
Some aspects of my work may be reminiscent of CBT. This is because highlighting and overcoming false assumptions and other cognitive biases constitutes an important feature of my practice of psychotherapy. Equally, one of my aims is to promote a more realistic approach to life. However, as I practice it, the process of education or re-education which is involved in therapy extends well beyond the cognitive aspect, which I see as constituting only a part of a broader experiential framework. In other words, the focus is not just on reforming how one thinks, but more broadly on revising and opening up how one experiences oneself, others and the world at large.
My framework: the physical, the social-cultural and the personal
It is perfectly fair to say that existing psychological and psychotherapeutic theories are coarse and immature. Hence the diversity of theories and approaches which are - rather unapologetically - presented to the public, sometimes wrapped in the notion of “integrative therapy” which provides a good example of an oxymoron. A major and crucial theoretical gap concerns the very conception of what makes a human being and its psychology. As we are used to celebrating the successes of modern science, this situation may sound unreal. However, it is a fact that both psychologists and psychotherapists are still debating what we are and what is going on for us at existential level, and therefore present views which are mutually exclusive. There is no agreement concerning most aspects of human psychology, including anxiety and depression, what they are, what causes them and how to best deal with them. From a client perspective, this matters a great deal. The question is whether the therapist of your choice is going to have the most appropriate perspective on what you are, as a human being, knowing that their work and interventions will largely, if not entirely, depend on that. You may think that considerations of this nature should not be of your concern (that is, they should only concern the professionals) but, like it or not, the messy situation of psychological sciences makes them extremely relevant to you. If you think of yourself as a Ferrari (as one of my clients did jokingly in his testimonial), you may not want to drive to a Volkswagen garage, do you? You want to make sure that you are in the right place so that you can get the right service.
Of course, a bit of guidance is necessary and I will try to make it as brief and straightforward as possible. To define and describe us, human beings, human sciences have been using a number of binary and ternary oppositions, a lot of which have become familiar to us. I will mention a few: mind-body, reason-emotion, conscious-unconscious, nature-culture (or biology-society), individual-society, freedom-determinism, organism-social and cultural being, mind-body-spirit, id-ego-superego (Freud), cognition-affect-behaviour (CBT), and biology-psychology-social context. The issue shared by all these commonly used oppositions is that they are all sociocentric, in other words they are not as descriptive as they pretend to be, but they primarily reflect the ideologies of our societies, that is how we like to portray ourselves in the west. From both scientific and therapeutic perspectives, this is of course deeply unsatisfactory (by the way, sociocentrism explains why psychology and psychotherapy remain immature and are not showing signs of making any progress, and why the most suggestive theories struggle to make it into the mainstream).
My efforts as a researcher have concentrated on offering a corrective picture of what makes a human being which is unbiased, that is purely descriptive rather than sociocentric. Through years of empirical research and experience as a therapist, I have come to the conclusion that in order to understand a human being and address their existential issues, three fundamental aspects or dimensions, and their relationships, need to be taken into account. These dimensions are the physical, the social-cultural and the personal, which I briefly introduce below. Importantly, from a practical perspective, the integration of these dimensions within my exchanges with my clients has nothing artificial. My work does not entail teaching you these dimensions and asking you to apply them to your self-understanding for sense making. The primary focus is on exploring in great detail your experiences, your feelings and your thoughts. And it is in the context of this exploration that we collaboratively reflect on the best ways of making sense of things, and on the best ways of talking about them, that is with what language. It is in the context of this collaborative reflection that I offer possible ways of shedding light on the underlying structure of your thought processes, your emotional life and your experiences. In other words, “theory” is always emergent, it is never brought a priori. The emergence of theory, that is of a certain way of understanding things supported by a certain language is meant to play a key role in supporting the development of your awareness and identification of opportunities for change, as well as in highlighting appropriate therapeutic techniques and strategies. These ways of working allow great freedom as my clients remain at all times in full control of the shape which their understanding and ways of talking can take. Whatever direction they choose to adopt, the sheer depth of our investigations force them to stretch their familiar conceptions, think out of the box and challenge their assumptions and vocabulary. This process is highly productive and creative, as well as empowering. It contributes to the opening of new horizons for the structure of their thinking, their experiencing and the way they feel about things.
The physical
In contemporary western societies, we usually exclusively associate the physical with the biological, the organic. Our conception of the physical aspect of being human has a huge blind spot: we fail to include the energetic in the picture, even though every other society or civilisation in the world does it and, one must add, so did we until the mid-19th century in our medicine and psychology. Never mind how we lost it (I recount the story in one of my books), the fact is that we need to re-introduce it if we want to have a hold on reality and not miss out on something fundamental. All of us have an implicit knowledge of the energetic aspect. All of us has experienced days when, in spite of sleep deprivation and lack of food intake, we still feel in great shape and on top of the world, and days where the opposite is true, namely we do everything right, sleep well, eat well, take good care of ourselves, and we feel depleted and like walking through treacle. We have here a clear contrast between what is happening at organic level and what is happening at energetic level. Muscular force is not the only thing which gives us momentum, another force is also (more or less) active. Hence all sorts of ad-hoc traditional treatments, amongst which the well-known acupuncture which, albeit timidly, has found its way into our hospitals and medical or para-medical practices. There is now a western acupuncture side by side with Chinese acupuncture, which does not mean that our portrayal of the human being has followed suit.
Taking the physical, that is both the organic and the energetic, into account is of considerable importance if one wishes to support emotional healing and personal development. To the clients who are willing, I suggest various practices and techniques which aim to integrate the physical aspects of our being as part of their self-care and personal development process and strategy. Amongst other things, I educate some of my clients to the practice of sophrology, a form of dynamic meditation, or meditation in movement. I also discuss diet, fitness, walking (including the way we walk), and how it feels to live and experience emotions within one’s body.
The social-cultural
From its earliest forms, psychotherapy tended to conceptualise existential issues and psychological turmoil primarily in intrapsychic terms, namely conflicts within the mind, maladaptive cognitions, or dysregulated affect. Over the past several decades, there has been an undeniable shift toward understanding more human experience as embedded in relationships and culture. In contemporary practice, the social and cultural dimensions of human nature are no longer viewed as external influences acting upon an otherwise self-contained psyche, but as processes that actively shape identity, emotion, meaning, and symptom formation. In individual and couple therapy, therapists show a greater ability to attend to how social roles, early care-giving relationships, interpersonal contexts and culture structure the client’s experience. However, psychology and psychotherapy still have a very long way to go. They still fail to grasp many fundamental aspects of collective psychology. This greatly impacts and limits the range of interventions within the context of therapy and personal development.
I will mention two major blind spots. The first one concerns the lack of understanding of western civilisation. The second one concerns a lack of insight about how the social-cultural dimension interfaces with the other two human dimensions, the physical and the personal.
To illustrate the first point, I will give just one example, but it is quite powerful and very telling. The tendency to intellectualise, that is to think primarily in conceptual, rational and logical terms, is detrimental to a healthy and balanced way of being and living, as it expresses a disconnect with one's experiencing. One stops being grounded in one's experiencing of things. However, the intellectualising tendency can be seen as having different origins.
In psychotherapy, intellectualisation is mostly understood as a common psychological defence, a way of managing emotional threat by shifting experience into abstract thought, analysis, theory, or explanation. Instead of feeling something directly — grief, fear, shame, anger — the person talks about it in conceptual, detached, or overly rational terms. The mind stays busy so the emotions don’t have to be fully lived and experienced. Different therapeutic schools conceptualise this slightly differently, but converge on the same core phenomenon. Psychodynamic therapy sees intellectualisation as a defence against anxiety and unconscious conflict, often paired with isolation of affect — the person knows what happened but doesn’t feel it. Humanistic and experiential therapies view it as a block to authentic emotional experiencing, keeping clients in their heads rather than in their bodies and feelings. CBT frames it as a form of experiential avoidance, where thinking replaces feeling in order to reduce distress in the short term. Trauma therapies frequently see it as a nervous-system strategy: when emotions were too intense in the past, the person learned to distance and control through cognition.
This approach to intellectualisation is missing something important. It overlooks the fact that the tendency to intellectualise is also, and maybe primarily, a cultural trait which characterises western civilisation and distinguishes it from all other civilisations on the planet. Eric Alfred Havelock (1903-1988), a philologist from the University of Toronto, is one of those who have stressed this fundamental aspect of western collective psychology, which he traced back to the ancient Greeks and their revolutionary and totally unique invention of alphabetic literacy. Havelock has demonstrated that, in the western world, while being a major technological achievement, alphabetic literacy has introduced a fracture between self and experience. The self has developed as a thinker, which accounts for the apparition and success of science and philosophy in our civilisation.
The tendency to intellectualise being a common feature of western civilisation, it is natural that therapists should find that their clients frequently reflect this tendency. However, this happens regardless of their idiosyncrasies and personal states of mind. If some individuals resort to intellectualisations as a means of distancing themselves from painful and distressing experiences, this happens on the background of a widespread tendency to intellectualise as a result of cultural conditioning and participation in western society. Recognising this has important implications for therapy and personal development, as it implies that the task of the therapist does not merely, nor primarily, entail challenging a strategy of self-protection (which does not mean that this does not play a part in some cases) but facilitating a process of re-education to support a deeper engagement with one's experiencing, a very different task indeed.
With this example, we touch another important but neglected aspect of psychotherapy, which is that psychological issues and troubles are not just individual afflictions susceptible to have cultural aspects but also, frequently, sheer facts of civilisation or phenomena which are closely associated with them. Although the therapist is only working with individuals and couples, their work entails excelling at both personal and collective psychologies at the civilisational level. Historically, both psychology and psychotherapy have been very poor at taking into account the civilisational aspect of our psychological life. This is a major shortcoming which I endeavour to overcome both in my theoretical and my practical work.
I will briefly talk about the issue concerning the interfacing between the social-cultural dimension and the other two human dimensions, the physical and the personal, in the section below.
The personal
The personal aspect of being human has been approached in two opposite ways, either through a naturalistic lens (a person is a self-regulating living organism) or a spiritual one (the person is an incarnated soul). Regardless of our choice of lens, naturalistic or spiritualist, the distinction between the personal dimension of being human and the other dimensions plays a key role.
I will restrict myself here to the consideration of the relationship between the personal and the social-cultural. The personal is (almost) everything which, in our psychology, cannot be attributed to the social-cultural (biology and genetics play a minor role in most aspects of human psychology). You get access to the personal by an operation of subtraction. However, what remains once one has removed the social-cultural aspect is absolutely huge, enormous. One can take the need to love and to be loved as an example, or the sense of justice, of what is fair or unfair, the importance that human beings grant to freedom, to beauty, to relationships, their need to belong and, at the same time, to transcend. None of this, and much more, is due to society. We were born with it. Many child psychologists have demonstrated this in their "baby labs", especially in the last 30 years. We are all born with a complex psychology and a personality.
It is important to note that if the structures of our psychological life and our personality are largely shared with other human beings, they have also a certain degree of idiosyncrasy. Because of this, we all belong to certain sub-categories of the human specie. For example, some of us are more worldly or extrovert while others are more outworldly or introvert.