Carl Conradi (He/Him)

Approach Description: As an integrative counsellor, I draw upon a number of different therapeutic approaches to help support processes that are unique to the needs and personality of each client. Indeed, each approach tends to emphasise exploration of different aspects of our experience, and in my view, no one approach is perfect for every client. For example, existential therapy is a highly philosophical modality that is most concerned with issues of freedom, responsibility, authenticity, meaning, identity, uncertainty, and loss. It sets aside questions of clinical pathology and diagnoses, and instead invites us to explore what it’s actually like to see the world through our own individual eyes. It emphasises establishing a strong and courageous connection with whatever is happening in the present moment, and listening to whatever the moment might be calling us to. So rather than providing tips and tricks for managing, say, depression, it offers a roadmap for investigating how we as individuals experience low mood; what needs and desires that low mood might be communicating to us; and what attitude(s) might helpfully be adopted in order to weather the storm. Alternatively, cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is a comparatively technical approach that is most interested in things like mindfulness, psychological tolerance and flexibility, and perspective-taking. It seeks to explore – in a more structured way – how our sensations, feelings, thoughts, and behaviours affect and reinforce one another. It encourages clients to adopt and inquisitive, scientific, and somewhat detached attitude towards their psychological experiences, and may involve skills practice, behavioural experiments, and homework exercises in order to achieve this goal. In CBT, if depression were present, we’d perhaps take time to map out when, where, and how low mood is most likely to strike you; to challenge some of the negative and self-perpetuating thoughts that often fuel depression; and to brainstorm tactics for working with low mood when it arises. Lastly, psychodynamic counselling is an approach that is largely concerned with the unconscious, as it is revealed during free-flowing conversation, in dreams, and within the client-counsellor relationship. Some of its key themes include the past, attachment patterns, self-honesty, defences, and creativity. Psychodynamic counselling assumes that we’re often only dimly aware of our true needs, motivations, and desires, and that psychological resilience can be improved by bringing these things into conscious awareness. In the case of depression, a psychodynamic approach would be interested in investigating how low mood might have served a counter-intuitively protective function in past relationships, and how over time it might have come to serve as a sort of emotional “default” during times of stress, even though our reality has since changed.