Jennie Roberts
Jennie Roberts
LOCATION: Lewes - online only
AVAILABILITY: Weekday afternoons and evenings
PRICE: £50 - 60 per hour (flexible)
SPECIALISMS:
Depression
Anxiety
Stress
Relationships
Crises of identity
Existential issues
Training
Jennie is a Senior accredited BACP psychotherapist and also a member of the UKCP and Psychotherapy Sussex. She began studying at WPF and then trained as a psychodynamic counsellor at the University of Brighton and went on to gain a Masters degree in psychoanalytic studies at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust. She completed her 4-year clinical psychoanalytic training at the Guild of Psychotherapists, and at the Maudsley Hospital in London. She has been working with patients in both London and Brighton for more than a decade.
Jennie has certificates in various other modalities and is qualified to supervise other therapists.
Approach
Jennie’s training has been pluralistic and she draws on many different therapeutic approaches, depending on the client’s particular needs and circumstances.
The guiding principle informing her work echoes the famous dictum of Socrates, to the effect that a close examination of one’s life can lead to a much more fulfilling existence. When you find yourself living a life under the rule of others in a continuous routine without examining what you actually want or who you really are, then all kinds of problems can present themselves, like a deep underlying depression, anxiety, even physical ailments.
Affording oneself the time and space to reflect can lead to a lessening of the burden and a self-knowledge that can be immensely liberating. Jennie prefers to use a longer-term, open-ended framework for working with clients, allowing the work to unfold at its own pace.
She has been working online since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and continues to use this medium.
Depression counselling
Depression manifests itself in different forms, from a general all-pervading long-term malaise to acute debilitating paralysis. Jennie will help you unpack the deeper elements that linger in your unconscious, ultimately helping you to find a different, more comfortable way 'to be.'
Often depression stems from very early experiences of guilt and self-shame that were never allowed to get processed and have become deeply internalised, to the point where you are unaware of troubling, conflicting motives, wishes, and desires that still influence you negatively. Freud believed that depression was caused by anger converted to self-hatred ("anger turned inward"). The therapeutic space will allow you to explore and gain an understanding of these destructive feelings, and thus by understanding them, remove their power.
Counselling for anxiety
Anxiety is experienced by almost all of us. It is a human response that, in moderation, fosters learning, problem-solving and productivity. However sometimes anxiety becomes too strong relative to our resources to cope with various stressors in our lives and becomes overwhelming, leading to panic attacks, difficulties with sleeping, inability to focus, physical symptoms, and a host of other disorders that have a terrible impact on our ability to function.
Rather like depression, in many ways, anxiety is understood, psychoanalytically, as basically a substitute for any unconscious feeling or unremembered memory. Whatever symptom of anxiety you are experiencing, the therapeutic space will allow you to understand its unconscious meaning, which will be specific and unique to just you - you are not a theory! - and through your relationship with your therapist you will work towards overcoming this anxiety.
Work with stress
Stress results when the demands placed upon you cause super-charged responses. Stress can be a beneficial state in certain circumstances. We understand harmful stress as the inability to cope with a perceived threat (real or imagined) to one's mental, physical or emotional well-being, which results in a series of physiological or behavioural responses. You may find that your stress levels are having an overall negative impact on your health, affecting your eating or drinking habits, or leading to anger, anxiety, aggression, apathy. It will seem that your responses to events in your life are disproportionate to their severity and the work will involve uncovering the underlying causes of these feelings, usually having a genesis in feelings, emotions and experiences that you have repressed.
Other information
Jennie has been a writer, a teacher, and an editor and has lived and worked in many parts of the world. Something of an adventurer, latterly Jennie has applied her love of exploration to the human psyche, always curious to know why we are the way we are.
