Therapies

My approach is systemic, solution-oriented, a caring approach based on listening and trying to help quickly before trying to understand everything and spending years on it.

What is systemic therapy?
Systemic therapy is based on the study of the relational functioning of systems. Particularly fruitful in the field of clinical psychology and family therapy, it is a brief therapy, as opposed to psychoanalytical type therapies and long term or loyalty psychotherapy. It was born within the Palo Alto school: Paul Watzlawick, American psychologist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, founded systemic family therapy in the 1960s. It is a global approach to the problem experienced by the patient, considering that the symptom he or she presents is the result of a dysfunction of the whole environment of which he or she is an integral part. In other words, all behaviour is adopted in interaction with others, enmeshed in a relational network.

Rogers added a rare quality of listening and humanity: he defined the therapeutic relationship as one of the forms of interpersonal relations, with the aim of encouraging growth, maturity and a greater capacity to face life by mobilising one's own resources.

You are the objects and exist only as such, but through your interactions, your links and how these are stretched, distended and broken.
Every system has a tendency towards homeostasis (i.e. it favours equilibrium by decreasing differences and avoiding changes) but is capable of transformation (i.e. it favours change and increases differences) for a better adaptation to life.
More concretely:
In a family, for example, if one element changes, the whole system changes and a crisis arises, the destabilisation felt can cause symptoms. These symptoms (break-ups, difficulties at school, depression, anorexia, etc.) express the suffering of the system, its questioning. It is very likely that their function is to maintain the functioning of the family system as it is. This expressed suffering is therefore like a band-aid that hides the wound but does not heal it.
A crisis and therefore, possibly, a symptom can be provoked by an evolution of the vital cycle, that is to say the great phases which mark out our life (birth, childhood, adolescence, couple, marriage, divorce, .....)

Family therapy aims to :

•   Be respectful of the needs of each family member (systems) and/or other key relationships in people's lives
• Recognise and build on the strengths and relational resources of individual members.
• Work in partnership 'with' families, not 'on' family members.
• To remain sensitive and open to all forms of family, relationships, beliefs and cultures.
• Enabling people to talk, together or individually, often about difficult or painful issues, with respect for their experiences.

In couple therapy, I will help you to :

• Change your view of the relationship. Throughout the therapeutic process, I try to help both partners to see the relationship in a more objective way, especially to stop the "blame game" and try to see what is happening between them as a process involving each partner. Understand that the relationship is expressed in a certain context, for example, financial or health difficulties. Identifying these situational constraints eases the burden on the couple.
• Changing dysfunctional behaviour: changing the way partners behave with each other is the biggest challenge and requires a lot of professionalism.
• Reduce emotional avoidance. Couples who avoid expressing intimate feelings put themselves at greater risk of becoming emotionally distant. Attachment therapy enables partners to be less afraid to express their need for closeness. According to this view, some partners who failed to develop, to "secure" emotional attachment in childhood have unmet needs that show up in their relationships with adults.
• Improve communication. Being able to communicate is one of the most important factors in intimacy: communication should not be aggressive, nor should it ridicule the other person when they do not express their true feelings. Couples with a long history of mutual criticism may need a different approach from those who seek to avoid conflict at all costs.
• Emphasise the strengths of the relationship and build resilience even more as therapy nears its end. Because so much couples' therapy focuses on the problem areas, it is easy to lose sight of the other areas in which couples function effectively. The idea is to help partners to draw more pleasure from their relationship, to develop a more positive 'story' about their relationship.

In short, take an objective look at your relationship, get help to reduce dysfunctional behaviours, feel that you can share your emotions, communicate more effectively, and focus on what works. Most importantly, by emphasising that every relationship has its unique challenges and strengths, you will give yours the best chance of survival, of life.

And don't forget that conflicts cannot be erased, so don't exhaust yourselves making compromises and therefore feeling inevitably frustrated: learn to live with them! Keep your differences, your misunderstandings, your conflicts, without contempt for the other's opinion and don't let them take up all the space: feed essentially on what "works", on what you like in the other, with benevolence, and let this part of your couple take up as much space as possible!

Suffering is sometimes so pervasive that it overwhelms the body, the face, the voice and especially the eyes. Let us often look into the eyes of our children.

Jacques Salomé

And parents should never use children to try to justify themselves, to blame the other person, to put them on their side. Not putting children at the heart of the conflict is essential, vital even.

Brief therapy is a problem-solving method that quickly helps the patient to find an effective and lasting solution. Traditional psychotherapies look for the origins of psychological difficulties in the past. Systemic and strategic approaches, on the other hand, focus on how problems manifest themselves in the present and aim for change rather than understanding. These approaches use the current life context of patients to solve problems. Based on new research in communication (Research from the Mental Research Institute of Palo Alto), brief systemic therapy seeks to relieve psychological suffering as quickly as possible by leading the patient to make new experiences that allow him or her to face the present and the future in a more serene manner. While this approach focuses on the difficulties experienced by patients in the present, brief systemic therapy pays great attention to the cognitive and affective aspects of these difficulties, as well as to the reactions of those around the patient. It has been found that the latter can often contribute to the genesis and maintenance of psychological problems, but also to their resolution. This also means that, even when the sufferer believes that he or she is not responsible for the problem, he or she will influence the other person by changing some of these behaviours and thereby changing their relational interaction.

Therapy is not analysis. Therapy is care. To be a therapist is to care. But to analyse a process or a situation is to try to understand it: it is an intelligent approach (intelligere: to understand), which gives meaning. In brief systemic therapy, knowledge of the supposed old why is neither necessary nor sufficient to change. The complaint characterises the beginning of an intervention: someone complains, not necessarily the one designated as disturbed. Psychology, psychiatry, analysis and many therapeutic currents each refer to their own reading: each current has its own language, its own labels. The Palo Alto systemic current will try to avoid this type of label: it will want to be non-normative. It will leave the classics of psychopathology to speak only of problems.

Brevity: it is a consequence, not a goal. Nicholas Cummings defines brief therapy as follows: "The patient is entitled to the quickest, fullest and longest lasting relief of his suffering in the least intrusive way possible. I will ask nothing illegal, nothing immoral, nothing impossible of him. In return, he will do everything to make me useless as quickly as possible.

Systemic: whether we are doing well or badly, everyone benefits. One of the principles of ethology is that an animal does not exist alone. Systemic therapies go in this direction by explaining that an individual does not exist alone. Durkheim already stated that suicide was a social act. Each of us belongs to different human systems: family of origin, present family, work environment, sports club, artistic or cultural circle, philosophical, spiritual, political grouping, etc. It is not necessary to convene the whole group to make a change - it is possible to change one's interaction with other members of the group, which can have an effect on the functioning of the group. The individual is part of a system and is a piece of it like a puzzle. By changing one piece, the whole jigsaw is changed (the system's resistance to change and the system's natural tendency to maintain its homeostasis will have to be taken into account).

Its indications:

Brief systemic therapy is aimed at anyone suffering from personal, relationship or family psychological difficulties: depression, anxiety disorders (panic attacks, phobias, etc.), eating, sexual and sleep disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD), relationship problems, school problems, parent-child relationship problems, problems of lack of self-esteem and professional difficulties linked to relationship problems, the work environment and/or performance-related issues.

Your child may be in the midst of a loyalty conflict, torn between his parents, unable to understand except that he must take sides to save himself. The phenomenon is complex and it is in this phenomenon that I have specialised.

The mechanisms at work during the trauma of the symbolic erasure of one of the parents by the other parent are not yet sufficiently recognised as strategies put in place by the subject to survive it.And yet...

And the relationship to the environment in which the child lives before, during and after the traumatic event can provide some insight into how and why the same event will be traumatic for one subject and not another.

Thus, in the same sibling group, we may find children who are completely taken in by the alienating parent, others who totally reject the manipulation, and still others who are able to bypass it, using total discretion and self-effacement to survive the tidal wave.

Because their place in the siblings, their age, the moment of development of their identity, what they have found in this environment and in the relationship they have created with it, make them unique beings with singular reactions.

We can all have "alienating" behaviours, which try to appropriate the exclusive love of the child or to wrongly denigrate the other parent during a separation, caught up as we are in our "rightness", our conviction of being in the right. The important thing is to be able to recognise this as soon as possible and to deal with it by getting help. And if you yourself are excluded from the child's life, getting help to have the "best possible attitude" is vital for you, but above all for the child, so that the situation does not become entrenched and so that the child can find both parents as soon as possible, if not together, then at least by his side. There are solutions and they are listed in the section "Making a success of your separation".

In what direction and to what extent should change be made? At what point and to what degree of autonomy does the problem become acceptable? The emergence of a current of change in the patient and his or her family requires a sometimes unexpected therapeutic gesture to emerge.

Brief therapy is a problem-solving method that quickly helps the patient to find an effective and lasting solution. Traditional psychotherapies look for the origins of psychological difficulties in the past. Systemic and strategic approaches, on the other hand, focus on how problems manifest themselves in the present and aim for change rather than understanding. These approaches use the current life context of patients to solve problems. Based on new research in communication (Research from the Mental Research Institute of Palo Alto), brief systemic therapy seeks to relieve psychological suffering as quickly as possible by leading the patient to make new experiences that allow him or her to face the present and the future in a more serene manner. While this approach focuses on the difficulties experienced by patients in the present, brief systemic therapy pays great attention to the cognitive and affective aspects of these difficulties, as well as to the reactions of those around the patient. It has been found that the latter can often contribute to the genesis and maintenance of psychological problems, but also to their resolution. This also means that, even when the sufferer believes that he or she is not responsible for the problem, he or she will influence the other person by changing some of these behaviours and thereby changing their relational interaction.

Therapy is not analysis. Therapy is care. To be a therapist is to care. But to analyse a process or a situation is to try to understand it: it is an intelligent approach (intelligere: to understand), which gives meaning. In brief systemic therapy, knowledge of the supposed old why is neither necessary nor sufficient to change. The complaint characterises the beginning of an intervention: someone complains, not necessarily the one designated as disturbed. Psychology, psychiatry, analysis and many therapeutic currents each refer to their own reading: each current has its own language, its own labels. The Palo Alto systemic current will try to avoid this type of label: it will want to be non-normative. It will leave the classics of psychopathology to speak only of problems.

Brevity: it is a consequence, not a goal. Nicholas Cummings defines brief therapy as follows: "The patient is entitled to the quickest, fullest and longest lasting relief of his suffering in the least intrusive way possible. I will ask nothing illegal, nothing immoral, nothing impossible of him. In return, he will do everything to make me useless as quickly as possible.

Systemic: whether we are doing well or badly, everyone benefits. One of the principles of ethology is that an animal does not exist alone. Systemic therapies go in this direction by explaining that an individual does not exist alone. Durkheim already stated that suicide was a social act. Each of us belongs to different human systems: family of origin, present family, work environment, sports club, artistic or cultural circle, philosophical, spiritual, political grouping, etc. It is not necessary to convene the whole group to make a change - it is possible to change one's interaction with other members of the group, which can have an effect on the functioning of the group. The individual is part of a system and is a piece of it like a puzzle. By changing one piece, the whole jigsaw is changed (the system's resistance to change and the system's natural tendency to maintain its homeostasis will have to be taken into account).

Its indications:

Brief systemic therapy is aimed at anyone suffering from personal, relationship or family psychological difficulties: depression, anxiety disorders (panic attacks, phobias, etc.), eating, sexual and sleep disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD), relationship problems, school problems, parent-child relationship problems, problems of lack of self-esteem and professional difficulties linked to relationship problems, the work environment and/or performance-related issues.