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My Approach to Psychotherapy

What Is It Like To Be In Therapy?

In each session, you are invited to bring what feels real and relevant, whether that’s a feeling, a dream, a memory, or something harder to name. We follow what emerges, staying open to shifts in energy, silence, surprise, or insight.

There is no need to 'perform' or explain perfectly. The work unfolds gently, shaped by a relationship grounded in attentiveness and trust.

Listening To The Deeper Story

Distress, stuckness, or symptoms may be messengers from a deeper place, part of the psyche’s effort to make meaning or initiate change.

Rather than 'fixing' or rejecting difficult experiences, we explore them with care. Often, what seems most disruptive becomes a doorway to renewed perspective, emotional clarity, and vitality.

What You Can Expect In Our Work Together

This is a depth-oriented and relational process that welcomes creativity and imagination. These values shape the work:

  • Collaboration: We develop a shared understanding of the themes and direction of your therapy.

  • Responsiveness: Sessions are alive to the present moment, not limited by agenda.

  • Freedom to Express: You can speak, pause, or use art materials if that feels meaningful.

  • Exploring the Past: Tracing how past relationships and experiences continue to influence your life now.

  • Working with the Relationship: Noticing how the therapeutic space itself may echo, challenge, or reveal relational patterns.

  • Engaging the Unconscious: Dreams, images, reverie, are welcomed as part of your unique psychological language.

  • Emotional Depth: A place to feel honestly—joy, grief, anger, uncertainty, all held within safe boundaries.

  • Moments of Silence: Valuing stillness as a fertile part of the work.

Your Role In The Process

You don’t need to arrive with answers. The spirit of enquiry is enough—a willingness to stay with what emerges, and to explore it together. Some sessions may feel spacious and illuminating; others more raw or uncertain. All are part of the process.

Over time, you’ll be encouraged to reflect on the therapy itself, including how it feels to be in the room with me. This honesty deepens the work.

Psychotherapy can sometimes feel challenging, as well as rewarding, and does require a degree of commitment to experience the benefits. 

The Alliance At The Heart Of Therapy

Our relationship is intentionally different from other relationships in your life. It’s both real and contained—designed to serve your growth, not to meet mutual needs or blur roles.

I keep my personal life mostly private—not to be distant, but to give full attention to your experience, and to allow our relationship to become a mirror, a lens, a space of transformation.

When well held, the therapeutic relationship can offer something rare: a place where you are fully seen, deeply listened to, and free to be.

Where Next?

If you're curious about whether we might work well together, you're welcome to get in touch to arrange an initial session. 

 

To contact me please use the email address or contact form below (also at the foot of any page on this website).

 

It is useful to mention some general background about what brings you to therapy, but there is no need to include personal information.

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I always respond to enquiries within 48 hours (unless on leave). If you do not see a reply please check your 'spam' folder, and contact me again if necessary.

You can also explore:

Andrew Phillips Art Psyhotherapist Abergavenny and online
HCPC registered Art Psychotherapist

If you would like to contact me please use this form, or click here for email

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Please note that sometimes my reply may go to your 'spam/junk' folders. I always respond to messages as soon as possible.

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My newsletter provides details of new work, exhibitions, writing on related themes, and sources of inspiration. You can read examples here

 

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Andrew Phillips

Visual Artist | Psychotherapist (HCPC) | Mentor 

 

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