WELCOME
I am Dr John Pollard. I am a chartered counselling psychologist and integrative psychotherapist and offer talking therapy in central London and online.
Experience:
I began working in mental health in the early two-thousands across many different posts in the NHS, charity and higher-education sectors. I have been running my own small private practice since 2018. My previous posts have included the following:
Cognitive Therapist working with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) in the NHS working primarily with depression and anxiety disorders.
Cognitive Therapist working with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) in Goldsmiths University working primarily with work-life balance, procrastination and social anxiety.
Integrative Psychotherapist working in the mental health charity Mind, working primarily with interpersonal difficulties, substance abuse and issues around personal identity.
Integrative Psychotherapist working in the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, working primarily with dealing with issues around motivation, complex personal history and engaging with creative and artistic work.
Integrative Psychotherapist in the Disability and Health Counselling Service, a specialist psychotherapy team within a wider NHS team, working primarily with the psychological impact of severe and enduring physical health issues (such as chronic pain, amputation and chronic disease).
Therapy:
I work with clients facing a wide range of difficulties. These include depression, anxiety, chronic stress, mood swings, difficulty relating to others, difficulty with feeling disconnected, and struggling with the impact of physical illness. A lot of the people I work with struggle with feeling stuck or directionless, or feeling unable to fully engage in parts of their life that are important to them. Some feel confused by a sense that things in their life are not quite right without knowing why this might be.
I am an integrative psychotherapist, which means that I have been trained to work from a number of therapy models. The best thing about this is that I can adapt the way that I work with each of my clients based on their individual needs and unique personal history.
Some clients seek support in learning ways of coping more effectively, and some hope to understand themselves more deeply. Of course there are those that wish to explore both these areas. In integrative psychotherapy all of these options are open. For some people, short-terms techniques focusing on developing their ability to self-support and stabilise are the most useful area to focus. This often involves approaches informed by Mindfulness or Cognitive-Behavioural therapy (CBT), for example. Sometimes clients feel that learning these strategies gets them to the point they want to reach, and for some it leads them to develop a stronger interest in self-exploration that can take the form of medium- and long-term psychotherapy.
The majority of my work involves medium or long term therapy taking place once or twice weekly. This work will tend to focus on collaborative reflection and exploration of a client's present needs while bringing their personal history into context with what goes on for them in the here-and-now. This often involves looking at patterns in relationships, narratives about ourselves that we hear from others and from within, and other patterns that can shed light on the things that go on under the surface of our awareness.
The way that I work is informed by an interest in using natural creative drives; what takes place in implicit non-verbal communication between people and the relationships between our bodies and our minds. Alongside these interests my integrative training allows me to develop a unique framework to draw together elements of therapeutic models that work best for the client I am working with. My fundamental aim across all clients is to do as much as I can to support my clients in improving their quality of life.
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