You have just made it to your initial psychotherapy session. Now what? There are five things that you should expect in a session, which should help you determine if you want to build a working psychotherapeutic relationship with the person in front of you.

You have decided to go into therapy, researched and chosen a Psychotherapist who you can work with.  Excellent, you are off to a good start.

I previously wrote about two important behaviours to learn that will be useful for your therapeutic journey. One of them was checking in, the other was journaling. In this article I am going to expand on journaling.

If you want to take this to a deeper level, then recording your dreams to work with is in order.

As part of my training, I was required to find and undertake two placements. My later placement was in various mental health settings with the NHS. My earlier placement was of my choice.

I don’t know about you, but I will always remember the week that Covid 19 landed, and we all went into lockdown. I was in England at the time.

I thought I would write a few paragraphs about research methods, as a way of positioning the next few articles I want to pen.

In an earlier article I wrote about quantitative and qualitative research. In this article I want to dive into one of the three qualitative research methods, that of Imaginal Research (Romanyshyn 2013)

In my last article I sketched out the six moments (stages) in Imaginal Research proposed by Romanyshyn. Now I will sift through the wealth of his writing to summarise the tools he proposes to support the moments.

These tools came out of transference dialogues, which I will write about in this article. Both alchemical hermeneutics and transference dialogues can be used in Imaginal Research (Romanyshyn).

In earlier articles I wrote about a qualitative research method and the tools used. That was imaginal research, by Romanyshyn (2013). In this article I want to outline another qualitative research method; that of heuristic research by Moustakas (1990).

In my last article I wrote about the structure of heuristic research. Now I want to touch on some of the tools or ways of working that help in the six stages.

Having worked both in England and New Zealand as a Psychotherapist, I have a sense that sometimes people might feel a little confused on who they should see for what type of issue or condition.

I explain how psychotherapy works and the approach I take for my clients.