MINDFULNESS-BASED CORE PROCESS PSYCHOTHERAPY IN HASSOCKS, MID SUSSEX
SARAH SWEET
“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being”
Hafiz
Welcome
During the current Covid 19 situation I am providing online and telephone counselling and psychotherapy sessions to clients throughout the UK. I am also seeing clients face to face at The Heeler Centre in Hassocks, West Sussex in line with government guidelines regarding the provision of mental health services. The room is big enough to be able to maintain social distancing, is well ventilated and strict hygiene conditions are maintained.
Please contact me to find out more.
Why therapy?
Counselling and psychotherapy help us in so many ways. We often seek therapeutic support when we are in difficulty or navigating the stormy seas of life’s challenges. Having someone attune to you with sensitivity can be tremendously validating and help bring much needed clarity to any situation.
Anyone can heal.
Mindfulness-based Core Process Psychotherapy allows us to understand and connect with ourselves more deeply through accessing awareness. Awareness is already present in us, but we often lose touch with it. A therapeutic relationship can enable us to reconnect with the inherent health and goodness that lie at the heart of our human beingness. From this place we can be guided by our own truth and wisdom.
Maybe the current global situation with the pandemic is exacerbating existing difficulties and you need to explore increased difficult feelings including anxiety, depression, or loneliness? Perhaps you have experienced a bereavement or other loss, are experiencing relationship difficulties or a significant life change? Does a pervading sense of dissatisfaction leave you wanting more connection and fulfilment?
Healing emotionally allows us to live with more authenticity.
Through being present to our experience, healing is possible.
My approach
I provide a safe, warm, supportive, confidential, and non-judgemental space for you to explore what you need to, and I am committed to helping you in your healing journey.
Mindfulness based Core Process Psychotherapy uses mindfulness (awareness) and compassion practices to work at depth therapeutically. It is a heartful way of working and there is a recognition that the client is the expert, the therapist is the facilitator. It integrates the profound wisdom of Buddhist psychology with its pertinent recognitions about human suffering and the understandings of Western psychotherapy. Recent advances in neuroscience and how trauma affects the body-mind system are also utilised.
Mindfulness helps us come into deeper relationship with what lies underneath our habitual ways of reacting and responding. Doing this with someone who is there to help you access what may otherwise be skipped over or not easily be brought into awareness, can be enormously helpful. It is often only through this kind of relational dialogue that we really understand ourselves. Therapist and client work together to explore present experience with kindness and curiosity. Present experience includes thoughts, feelings, bodily felt sensations and images. Working with the whole body-mind allows different aspects of ourselves to be known in a much deeper way.
Reconnecting with the inherent health, joy, freedom, and innate wisdom that lie at the heart of our human beingness is tremendously liberating and profoundly healing. Our deepest wounds often occurred through not having been met fully in relationship as little ones, for whatever reason. Being met with warmth, acceptance and recognition can be such a balm for the soul.
In the end it is not about getting rid of aspects of ourselves we would rather were not there, but in coming to a fuller understanding of them they naturally tend to dissipate and transform, and we become able to live from a place of more personal authenticity. Clients are supported to work through and let go of unresolved pain and trauma, allowing space to be with what may have seemed unbearable.
The transformational experience of awareness gives us more choice in how we meet life experience. In being present to our experience, healing is possible.
“The main affliction of our modern civilisation is that we do not know how to take care of the suffering inside us and we cover it up..."
Thich Nhat Hahn
About me
I am passionate about helping people reconnect with their inherent health, wellbeing, and innate wisdom so that they can flourish. Having travelled widely, living in different countries and cultures for extended periods, I recognise the impacts of navigating cultural differences and how this can affect our sense of belonging. I love to empower people in ways that allow them to inhabit their lives more fully. I am inspired by the importance of collaboration and how we can bring our unique qualities to different situations when we are supported to do so. I welcome diversity and aspire to practice inclusivity wherever possible.
Undertaking the training at the Karuna Institute was a natural step for me to make after discovering both the transformative power of awareness through meditation and the opportunity to amplify this potential in my life through working at depth therapeutically. I have a longstanding meditation practice which deeply informs my work as a psychotherapist.
I am particularly interested in helping people work through traumatic imprints to restore resilience and reconnect with authenticity and personal truth.
Qualifications
I hold an MA in Mindfulness-based Core Process Psychotherapeutic practice from the Karuna Institute awarded by Middlesex University. I am a member of BACP and am working towards accreditation with UKCP. I undergo regular supervision and have full professional insurance. I am data protection/GDPR compliant. I abide by the Karuna Institute’s Code of Ethics as well as those of BACP and UKCP.
I have done a variety of additional supportive trainings including focussing, understanding trauma and specifically childhood trauma, and how shame can be healed and worked with. I completed the last training in pre- and perinatal somatic psychology given by Ray Castellino.
Issues I work with
Issues that we can work with together include:
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Anxiety, Abuse, Addiction, ADHD, Bereavement and loss, Co-Dependency, Depression
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Existential Issues, Identity, Loneliness
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Guilt, Shame, Childhood Trauma, PTSD, lack of a sense of Belonging
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Relationship Issues, Sexuality, Gender
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Self Esteem, lack of self-worth and lack of Confidence
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Shame, Guilt, Stress and Traumatic Imprints
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Anger, Eating Disorders and OCD
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The transmission of intergenerational or transgenerational trauma
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Spirituality, Creating Resilience, Facing Redundancy
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Issues Around Adoption, Restoring Work-life balance
"Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced"
James Baldwin
Sessions
This work is underpinned by the mindful presence of the therapist - there is no need for the client to have any previous mindfulness experience.
It is possible to explore specific issues in a time limited frame such as in counselling. However, if you can give yourself the gift of coming for weekly psychotherapy sessions, where trust in the therapeutic relationship can grow over time, the lasting and deeply transformative benefits of this kind of work are more likely to be experienced. Working at depth over time allows a greater unfolding so that patterns can come to be known and worked through. I respect your own inner wisdom and we work with whatever you want to bring.
With the current Coronavirus pandemic situation, I am seeing clients throughout the UK online via zoom or by telephone. I am also working face to face at The Heeler Centre in Hassocks, West Sussex.
It is important to feel that your therapist is right for you. Please contact me to arrange an initial session which is free of charge to see if we both feel we would like to work together and for you to ask any questions.
Get in touch
If you'd like to find out more about sessions with me, please contact me.
