Gwyn Williams

Introduction

I am a humanistic existentialist counsellor and a relational mindfulness psychotherapist.  I help clients in the following areas:

-               Developing the capacity to be with inner emotional pain and struggle

-               Sadness, Depression

-               Anxiety, Fear, Terror

-               Anger

-               Life transitions

-               Psychospiritual Emergence / Higher Self connection

-               True Self 

-               Embodied Self

-               Disassociation, numbness, Defensiveness

-                Gender diversity, sexuality

I combine the wisdom of Buddhist frameworks, with western psychodynamic and existential ways of being with our inner and outer processes.  This is a person-centred approach that invites clients to connect to their deep inner guidance and develop an inner awareness in order to move through difficulty.  

I use a range of tools from Buddhist wisdom, neuroscience around trauma, and person-centred approaches, including:

Embodied Immediacy:

I invite clients to drop down into their felt sense: what is happening right now?  And can I deepen into this?  This way of working helps clients to turn towards inner distress and difficulty, instead of avoiding areas of their inner life that might be asking for their attention.  If we can confront our pain, and stay at our working edge, this can help us to individuate and grow through something. To be more embodied means that we are able to sense into our inner feelings that we are holding in our bodies, and become more attuned to our sensations, feeling-tones and inner resonance.  

Limitless Qualities :

If I can come into my midline, I naturally orient to the limitless qualities of: Loving Kindness, Compassion, Empathetic joy for others, Equanimity.  It is natural, and to be expected, that we are thrown into pain and suffering throughout the day as an ordinary experience of our humanity.  Rather than judge this, we can notice when we move from responsive mind to a more reactive experience, and honour this without judgment.  More reactive experiences might include feeling attached or having aversion or craving, rather than a sense of loving kindness.  We might feel pity or cruelty rather than compassion.  We may compare ourselves negatively to others, or feel insincere, or envious instead of empathetic joy.  We may move into indifference or anxity or greed, rather than feel equanimity, or grounded. 

All of these painful experiences of self and others can be observed with kindness and understanding, so that we can meet our humanity and the humanity in others from a place that deeply respects our inner-wellbeing without demanding perfection.  

Non-dual realities:

We can easily create inner and outer enemies: this is right or wrong, good or bad, desirable or undesirable.  A non-dual approach works with and challenges such polarities and splitting so that we can become a wider container to all of our inner material.  It is easier, somehow to see ourselves as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but this is a young pattern, and part of the conditioned self.  A non-dual approach can allow far more inner complexity, where we don’t need to stay fragmented in order to survive, but can contain all of our inner contradictions and difficulties with less intensity or defence.  We can be ‘both… and’ instead of ‘either.. or’ and learn to meet our inner and outer complexities, where there may be a multitude of needs.  

Inner Family Systems, along with a psychodynamic awareness of young patterns that may no longer be helpful, can help us to widen our aperture on both internal and external patterns or ways of relating to self and others.  

If we are less fixed in our views, and integrate the vague and the complex, we have more access to creativity before things become too formed.  The in between and in betwixt can be a place of nurture, growth and shifts.  

Co-creative Space:

We were emotionally wounded through relationship, and this was an inevitability of our birth, and childhood.  We can become interested in what happens to us when we stay defended or protected because of these wounds, so that we can also claim our deep healing process, so that we can notice the difference between our survival brain and our evolving psyche.  Trauma models such as polyvagal theory can be very psycho-educational, because when we change our emotional states, our thinking also changes.  

A therapeutic relationship can also offer a resonance to safety, openness and growth so that a client can energetically ‘let be’ and ‘let go’: accept and move through areas of stuckness or limitation.  Because relational life is dynamic, and we have all been wounded through relationship, we can also heal through relationship if we are able to open the self-sealed system, and allow our vulnerability to be seen, validated, acknowledged and appreciated.  

Links
Karuna Institute
karunainstitute.co.uk/
karunadartmoor.co.uk/

I work on a weekly basis, at the same time each week for an hour's session.

Currently 1 hour sessions are £60.  

If you would like to book an initial session to see what therapy with me would be like for you, please call, text or email.  I work both face to face and online.  

I came to practice as a psychotherapist through my own therapeutic journey.  I was quite disembodied as a way of coping with life, and through years of counselling and psychotherapy, I learned to live more authentically as a gay man, as part of my experience of being in relationship with others in a way that feels natural and more embodied and integrated.  

Before working in private practice as a psychotherapist, I taught in Higher and Further Education settings for over 20 years.  I have also worked as a counsellor in Humanistic Existentialist counselling, before deepening into psychotherapy training.  

When I'm not reading about growth and development, I enjoy playing the classical guitar, exercising and spending time in nature.