The approach
Transpersonal therapy and hypnosis
There is a kind of difficulty that does not show up as a symptom. The person functions, gets things done, is not depressed in the clinical sense, and yet for a long time has not felt that what they do is taking them anywhere. They have tried what there was to try. Managing is no longer enough.
Often a symptom or a crisis is the way a pattern becomes visible. This work uses hypnotic trance and imaginal methods to reach those patterns and to work on the person's relationship with them.
The transpersonal approach treats the spiritual dimension as a legitimate part of human experience, without imposing it on anyone who is not looking for it.
I see my role as carrying the lamp that lights the next step, in a discovery that belongs to the other person.
Methods
- Presence and compassionate attention
- Cultivating presence in the body and in emotion, and the ability to observe what happens without being taken over by it. This is what makes it possible to stay with difficult material and integrate it afterwards. The attention of the person accompanying you matters too. An unhurried, non-judgemental presence gives you room to bring what is most genuine and to explore it without conforming to your therapist's beliefs.
- Therapeutic hypnosis
- Trance induction, a natural state of inward focus, for work with emotional and behavioural patterns. You stay in control and, as a rule, remember what happens.
- Imaginal and regression methods
- Work with your personal narrative through imaginal scenes and symbolic distance. Placing the material on a stage, in the third person, lowers defensive activation and gives access to patterns with less resistance. The work rests on what the material means to you and what it allows you to integrate. It does not depend on whether things happened exactly as they appeared, and trance is not used to confirm that.
- Work with narrative and metaphor
- Story therapy and the therapeutic use of symbolic material.
- Systemic representation
- Occasionally I use figures and spatial markers to make visible a relational configuration that you know but cannot put into words. It is a method of externalisation, with the same mechanism as the other imaginal methods. We work with what emerges for what it shows you about your place in that system. I do not use it to draw conclusions about other people or about what happened in the family.
Scope
This work is complementary and does not replace medical or psychological care. Where there is a diagnosed illness, I work in coordination with the person's clinical team.
- Independent work
- Situational stress and anxiety, sleep difficulties, grief, life transitions, repeated behaviour patterns, specific fears and phobias, relationship difficulties, questions of meaning and direction, goal-setting and performance.
- Complementary work, with an active clinical team
- Diagnosed depression, processing and integrating the experience of chronic illness or cancer, pain management, symptoms with a significant stress component, preparation for childbirth, sexual dysfunctions and eating disorders in people already in treatment, in coordination with the professionals responsible.
- Children and adolescents
- Only with the informed consent of their legal guardians, with scope and depth adjusted to age.
- What I do not take on
- Acute psychiatric conditions, suicidal ideation, active addictions, severe dissociative disorders, uncontrolled epilepsy without coordination with a neurologist, or situations that need a medical assessment not yet done. In these cases I refer you to the appropriate professional.
I am not a psychologist or a doctor. I do not make diagnoses.
If you are in crisis, contact SNS 24 (808 24 24 24) or, if you are in immediate danger, 112.
Sessions
- Length
- Usually 1 hour without trance and 1h30 with trance. If more time is needed, we agree it session by session.
- Price
- €40 per hour, charged in half-hour units. A 1-hour session costs €40 and a 1h30 session costs €60.
- How it works
- It starts with a history-taking and an exploration of goals. Then we go deeper into the questions, with or without trance, and integration runs throughout. The work continues outside the consulting room, with writing and ritual suggestions, breathing and attention exercises and guided hypnosis recordings, among other things.
Background
- Transpersonal Therapist, two-year training with personal therapy, tutoring and practice retreats, Escola Transpessoal (500 hours)
- Practitioner in Therapeutic Hypnosis and Past Life Therapy, Instituto Português de Hipnose (108 hours)
- Constellations Applied to Individual Sessions, Escola Transpessoal (171 hours)
- Story Therapy, Escola Transpessoal (42 hours)
- Transgenerational Hypnosis, Instituto Português de Hipnose (38 hours)
- Introduction to Psychosomatics, Escola Transpessoal (26 hours)