C.G. Jung once wrote that “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” We tend to try to avoid pain and suffering however we can. And see suffering as something that shouldn’t be part of life. But it is, and always will be. The secret to dealing with suffering or pain is being willing to courageously accept and experience it rather than constantly avoiding it, which only creates additional suffering in the form of various psychiatric symptoms.

Here at NuVision Counselling your therapy sessions are designed to be holistic, experiential and motivating. Each session is tailor-made to suit your needs. Sessions involve psychoeducation, free associations and many opportunities for experiments with thoughts, behaviours, body movements and ideas. Our work centres around your therapy goals, and your search for answers and resolutions to often difficult questions.

The “unconscious,” as Sigmund Freud professed, is the “unknown” or “not known.” That portion of subjective experience which is obscured, invisible to consciousness, at least “at the moment.” It consists largely of the parts of ourselves we deny, dissociate, despise, denigrate, dread and generally repress.

The secret is to take the unconscious and all its complexes seriously, treating it with the respect and sense of mystery, awe and wonder it deserves. And to recognize the ultimate futility of repression, rather allowing one’s self to consciously experience emotions as they arise, while at the same time learning to pause between stimulus and response rather than reflexively acting on them. We have both the freedom and responsibility to choose how we respond to our feelings. But that, like any other skill, takes practice.

At Nuvision Counselling we believe work in psychotherapy is about healing through the integration of psyche and body. When we attend for therapy, we may experience change from the beginning, or no big change for weeks or months. We may talk about the same things in circles before something happens: an insight, an understanding, a gush of emotions, a relief from tension.  When and how we get to this point in the therapy is usually not foreseeable. The process can be described as to be like titration. We make small steps. There is no explosion, but natural, holistic change.