Samuel Waumsley
M.A. Clinical Psychology (UCT, 2010)
B.Soc.Sci. Hons (UCT); B.A. Hons (UCT); B.Soc.Sci. (UCT)
Trainied at the UCT Child Guidance Clinic.
Psychotherapy sessions for adults offered.
Practice established in 2012. Registered.
Member of PSYSSA.
Published a review of therapy done at the UCT Child Guidance Clinic between 1997 and 2007, arguing psychotherapy was shown to be useful to adults and children across diverse South African socio-financial contexts, in the South African Journal of Psychology in 2010.
Psychotherapy
Brief interventions available, or longer-term sessions, scheduled according patients' needs.
Being conscious of one's feelings, contemplations and values is useful psychologically, and is a key method in psychotherapy. I work to provide a down-to-earth, respectful and encouraging psychotherapy space.
Therapy process:
1. Meeting, history-taking and describing issues at hand.
2. Building understanding around symptoms and challenges.
3. Subsequent sessions aim to familiarise ourselves with this dynamic understanding of the issues at play.
4. Continued focus on day to day life contemplatively and around ways to shift outcomes positively and meaningfully.
Clinical focus:
- Anxiety: Threat appraisal related feeling. Is associated with the fight, flight, freeze or friendly reflex. Sometimes anxiety seems to reflect external or internal tensions we feel. Anxiety can be a feeling of unease; of self-consciousness, of being threatened, or stressed.
- Panic attack: Heightened intense anxiety. Panic disorder includes symptoms like sudden increased heart rate, feeling faint, sweating, panic and a feeling of impending doom, racing thoughts and shallow breathing. Often in panic attack arguably psychological factors impact the physiological, and demand to be heard.
- Self-esteem: Our sense of self is critical, informing our day to day functioning. Seeking confidence is perhaps a useless task; searching for authenticity in ourselves, however, is a clearer goal. Our sense of self and our conditioned experience of self-trust is fundamental to us.
- Depression: A feeling and problem that can involve our sense of narrative and sense of self in life, and our experience of and response to the world. It can be useful to consider depression as a burn-out, a woundedness. Depression can feel like hopelessness, and people have feelings of guilt or low-worth.
- Dream interpretation: Dreams are arguably the ruminations of our unconscious mind, mulling over, forming perspectives and dream scapes 'subconsciously'. In that process there is often an objective mirroring of life, feeling and meaning that one can pick up in dreams.