Individual Therapy

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Details of the Individual Therapy that Janine offers:

Each session is 50 minutes
If you need to cancel a session, we require 24 hours notice
In terms of the account, most medical aids do cover individual therapy. It remains your responsibility to check up on the limits of your medical aid and to monitor when your therapy benefits are depleted. If you are on medical aid, we will submit the account directly, and the medical aid will pay us directly. Once your medical aid is exhausted, you will receive a monthly account, via email, after the last session of each month, which needs to be settled before the first session of the new month.
Cost per session: R1 300

Guidelines

Individual therapy is a safe environment where you can share your inner world with a therapist. Though therapists are trained in different theories when it comes to therapy, there is a common thread running through all therapies, regardless of the theoretical base – that is, it is a confidential space where you can expect to be listened to and regarded.

There is both long-term and short-term therapy. Given your presenting problem, your therapist will guide you in this regard. For example, if it is possible to address your presenting problem by means of short-term therapy, the therapist will advise you such.

Anxiety/Depression

The first stirrings of an inner world that have remained largely dormant and unknown to an individual over years can be a disposition or mood state that we commonly call anxiety or depression. This is sometimes precipitated by a major external event (a trauma, loss, crisis, significant transitional events, or an intense interpersonal encounter), or by changes within us, pertaining to significant life stages (adolescence, mid-life, old age). On the other hand, the precipitating event to anxiety or depression can at times be quite minor, it representing the last straw, indicating that, unbeknown to us, there has been an accumulative effect of repressed and suppressed emotion over years. In both cases, inner tension ensues – the need to let go of emotion (given the accumulation of emotion overtime or the sudden experience of unusually intense emotion) encountering our programmed inner “rules” or memorized habitual experience of holding on to emotion (suppressing or repressing it). This inner tension is experienced as anxiety.

Depression is experienced when the habit of holding on is so entrenched that no letting go process can be consciously embarked on at all. It is as if our inner world has become numb.

In accompanying individuals through bouts of acute anxiety and depression, and noticing the factors contributing to their recovery, we have begun to understand more fully the link between these mood states and our inner worlds. We have noticed, without exception, that those who present with symptoms of anxiety or depression display a particular way of relating to, processing, and working with their emotions that is characterized by denial, minimizing, or suppressing of their feelings in general, or specific emotions in particular. Their attitude towards their emotionality or specific emotions is often characterized by unhelpful guilt or shame, or irritability and impatience with the presence of vulnerable emotions. They carry introjected parental voices that continue to convince them that they are not “allowed” to feel okay about being angry or sad or fearful or confused.

Janine’s approach to addressing and treating anxiety and depression incorporates this movement towards oneself, one’s emotions and one’s inner world, and its woundedness.