Therapy in Hackney
CAT looks at patterns in how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to other people. In CAT, we aim to process and better understand unhelpful patterns by making links to your past. We then look for ways together to break the unhelpful patterns in the present and do things differently going forward.
CAT combines psychoanalytic ideas about how we relate to others with a warm, open, collaborative approach in the room.
CAT is a time-limited therapy. A specific number of sessions are agreed at the start. This can be 16 or 24 – usually 16.
Therapeutic letters are a big part of CAT. After our early sessions, I will bring you a draft of a letter describing your story and patterns. I’ll invite you to make changes, so we produce a final version of the letter together. I’ll also invite you to write a letter back to me. From here, you’ll choose what you’d like to focus on in therapy.
At the end of therapy, I’ll bring you a goodbye letter and invite you to write me one. This letter reflects on what has come out of therapy, how you feel at the end and looking to the future.
Together in sessions, we will map out on paper your key patterns of relating to yourself and others. Once we have an understanding of your patterns, we will look for ‘exits’ together – ways to do something different and break the patterns.
CAT uses ‘reciprocal roles’ to think about relational dynamics and map them out.
A reciprocal role captures the way of relating to someone (or yourself), and how that feels to be on the receiving end of.
We often ‘learn’ reciprocal roles in our early life experiences.
Painful experiences can hit extra hard as an adult because they hit on a reciprocal role from early experiences. In the example of rejecting, this could be that a small rejection in the present feels really painful. It could also be that you are more likely to see an ambiguous neutral situation as rejection because you are experiencing the situation through the lens of your reciprocal role.
Many of our most core reciprocal roles come from our family relationships or other close relationships when we were growing up.
But there can be reciprocal roles that come from wider community and societal experiences too.
Sometimes there are situations where we inadvertently behave in a way that feeds into keeping the reciprocal role going.
Part of the work in CAT is thinking about instances where this may be happening. If we spot any, we can dig in to understanding them and then think about how you can do something differently that breaks the pattern instead.