What To Expect

Our sessions last 50 minutes and can either be held in-person in Crown Street Wollongong, or virtually via Zoom. At the time of confirming your booking, we will send you the Zoom link or full address details.

You and your therapist are the only people involved, and everything that is discussed is completely confidential.

Early in the process, you will identify specific life goals or personal issues that you want to work on in therapy, and these will become the focus of our sessions together.

We usually follow a 4-stage process to each session:

  • Reporting Back

    – how have things been since our last session? What have the main challenges been, and how have the things we have been discussing in our sessions be helpful?

  • Today's Focus

    – we agree on a topic to take up most of today’s session. Is there an aspect of your personal life, partner relationship, family situation or work situation that we can talk through together?

  • Teaching Component

    – along with insights learned from discussing the issue of the day, we bring to each session some training content to provide some practical help with the issue at hand.

  • Homework

    – we finish by identifying strategies to implement following the session.

We recommend that our clients keep a written journal during their period of therapy. This can be a powerful tool to help identify patterns, and to bring greater motivation to changing behaviours. Keeping a record of dreams can also be a tremendous source of wisdom to bring into the therapeutic process.

Click here to book your free initial 20 minutes consultation with Rod.

therapeutic types

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

= seeks to equip us with greater psychological flexibility. We learn to stop letting negative ideas and feelings control us. Instead of engaging with those thoughts and emotions, we learn to simply notice them when they come along, and then let them go.  ACT is a very positive approach. Rather than focusing on what feels wrong within us, we look with optimism to what is good. Key to the ACT methodology is clarifying our key values, and to start making better choices for our lives based on those values.

Integrative Psychotherapy (Schema Therapy) 

= helps when negative thoughts are so deeply ingrained that they need to be more directly challenged. Examples of some of entrenched schemas we often encounter are anxious attachment, emotional deprivation, shame, enmeshment, self-sacrifice, approval-seeking, emotional inhibition and unrelenting standards. Through a range of therapy techniques, including CBT and psychoanalysis, we help you to identify those schemas adversely impacting on your life, and then help you with strategies to directly challenge those schemas, and develop new patterns which bring renewed optimism and energy for life.

The Internal Family Systems Model (no Bad Parts)

= is a new methodology that many clients are finding extremely powerful. It recognises that our personalities are multi-faceted, and that we are not always completely consistent in our thinking and behaviours. This process allows is to listen to all of our different “parts”, and working towards a more integrated and nuanced understanding of what will make us happy. This theory builds on ideas first developed by Carl Jung, who used the process of active imagination to have internal dialogues between different personalities in the subconscious.

When we meet with you for the first time we will work out which approach is best suited to your circumstances. In some cases it ends up being a combination of methodologies - whatever work best to help you move forward in life.