Oded Reitten BA, MA, Adv Dip Exis Psy, SEA UKCP accred.

In my work as a psychotherapist, I talk to people about the way they live, where they have been and where they seem to be going. Being a human being is complicated, doing this personal work is a conscious choice to turn your personal struggle into a conversation and see what emerges from it; but also fundamentally, it expresses your attempt to change your life. It is an opportunity to question the way we live and make sense of our experiences and realise possibilities that we just can't see from our particular predicament.

I think psychotherapy can be 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. 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. In a similar way, the kind of conversation you and I may have in therapy can provoke a re-evaluation of the ways you understand and make-sense of your life.

My approach is relational. It is founded on a basic assumption that your personal experience of yourself, others and the world as a whole is significantly affected by your relationships with other people. In therapy we can talk about these relationships, what they mean to you and how they affect you. We may even sometimes notice and talk about how our relationship is going, and may become more aware of subtle aspects of your tendencies and default ways of being in a relationship.

Interactions with others will always change us to some degree, but I think that people are different in their 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 as much as it is about acknowledging how things are at the moment, in order to allow things to change organically. Through learning and teaching meditation for several years I found that a significant part of the stress and suffering that people experience stems from their wish that reality would be different from how they are experiencing it right now. The practice of therapy for me involves a kind of meditation, sitting with, observing and acknowledging what is already happening and is actually taking place.

Therapy for me is a place we can reflect together about the way we exist, the way we affect and are affected by others – a process of widening the spectrum of how we make sense of the happenings in our lives and of possibilities we are inclined to forget.