Oded Reitten

Being a human being is complicated; it is an endless shift between connecting and disconnecting, succeeding and failing, experiencing the brighter and darker sides of existence. Starting this personal work is a conscious choice to turn deep questions and personal struggles into a conversation and see what emerges from it; but also fundamentally, it expresses an attempt to both accept and change our lives. 

The work I do with people is not directed by theory, but by intuition. I seek to reach towards what can never be fully understood and make space for what is already there, waiting to open.

I think psychotherapy can be experienced and understood in different ways as it offers many things at once, and different things at different times. As human beings, we have a basic need to express our experiences to others. Living life without finding an expression to how we see and feel things can be very difficult, if not painful. Therapy offers a set-up where you can express yourself, and with the help of the therapist become more aware of the obstacles that you encounter in expressing your experience to another person. It can encourage you to express the more vague and ambiguous areas of your emotional experience; the ones you can feel but find hard to put into words.

My orientation to psychotherapy has its roots in Existential philosophy. Existential philosophy explores the complexity of being human; it invites us to observe and re-evaluate the way we see and understand the world we live in. My approach is relational. We don’t have others we are ‘of ‘ them. The conversation in therapy emphasises this interconnected reality and allows us to closely explore the way we affect each other. 

Interactions with others will always change us to some degree, but I think we are different in our susceptibility to be changed through interactions. To accept the change that any interaction can offer to the way one views their world is to accept that what one ‘knows’ about oneself and the world is never complete. People often desire connection, but are afraid of the change it brings to the way they think. When one ‘stretches’ towards another person, one is ‘stretching’ their own self and their horizons of understanding. Therapy is a place where your experience of being with others can be transformed.

Although it may seem contradictory to some clients, I think therapy is not about change so much as it is about acknowledging what life is like right now, with the aspects we sometime prefer to deny. Through learning and teaching meditation for many years I found that a significant part of the stress and suffering that we experience stems from our incessant wish that reality would be different from how it is experienced right now. The practice of therapy for me is a kind of meditation, sitting with it, observing and acknowledging what is already happening and is actually taking place.

Concessions according to availability - can be discussed and agreed in person during the initial session.