More about me
Marcus Page Psychotherapy
Marcus Page
Group Analytic Psychotherapist and Couples Therapist
More about me
I set up my private psychotherapy practice in 2000 but continued to work in the public sector until 2018.
For fifteen years, up until 2018, I worked as an Adult Consultant Psychotherapist in a large NHS community mental health trust. In my locality, I was both the Lead for psychological therapies and Clinical Lead for the multidisciplinary team of psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health nurses, social workers and occupational therapists.
In this setting, I had the privilege of encountering individuals from every walk of life who had experienced misfortune and stresses that had led to severe and enduring mental distress. My clinical work included assessments of the more complex presentations of mental ill-health and offering therapies to individuals, couples and groups.
These patients are often self-blaming and reluctant help-seekers. They benefit from others helping them see that their difficulties in adulthood, and particularly with developing trusting relationships, often stem from adaptations to an insecure childhood in which adverse experiences of abuse, loss or neglect have not been mediated by a safe, responsive parent or caregiver.
In my work with adults, I continue to draw upon my previous work with children and families during an earlier fifteen-year career in the child protection field. I was a senior social worker in a specialist multidisciplinary unit involved with complex investigations and providing therapy to children and parents. I was an Expert Witness in the Family Court and offered training and consultation around the safeguarding of disabled and communication-impaired children and young people.
QUALIFICATIONS:
Group Analyst and Member of the Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) 1999
Registered with the United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapists (UKCP) no. 5616
Master in Social Work and CQSW 1984
BA (Hons) Leeds University 1976
What I offer
I help to provide a dependable, safe space to support you in exploring the nature of your difficulties and addressing the factors that are preventing you changing in the ways that you want.
I offer psychoanalytically informed and attachment-based psychotherapy to individuals and couples and conduct a once-weekly analytic group that I set up in 2002.
I provide clinical supervision for psychotherapists and organizational supervision for managers in charitable bodies. I teach on the University of Canterbury’s postgraduate doctoral clinical psychology programme and I provide mediation in team, organizational or family disputes.
I offer a three-session ‘extended consultation’ at the outset. This provides the opportunity for exploration of your current difficulties and placing them in the context of your formative early relationships and significant life events that have shaped your values and beliefs. It allows me to arrive at an initial psychological formulation that I share with you. The discussion of what form of psychotherapy might best suit your needs forms part of the consultation.
The intervals between the three sessions often leads to new thoughts occurring or for dreams to arise, which we reflect upon in the following session. By the third session, you will have sufficient experience of me to judge whether I, and the psychotherapy I offer, can be helpful to you and for us to agree the key areas you may benefit from working on. I provide a written contract for the therapy we agree upon.
During the consultation, if you choose not to proceed further or if I consider that a psychotherapist with a different approach might better meet your therapy needs, I shall assist you in finding suitable alternative help.
Difficulties I help with
Relationship difficulties - personal or work-related
Feeling an "outsider" in groups
"Unaccountable" feelings or the absence of any feelings
Depression
Anxiety
Anger
Grief including delayed or unresolved grief reactions
Boredom
Childhood trauma and adversity
Difficulties in knowing one's own mind
Conflicting feelings
Dependence
Avoidance
How can Psychotherapy help?
Psychotherapy can help us in realising that what feels most personal and unique to us is also most universal and that our internal conflicts are very often a reflection of unresolved conflicts in our families of origin or wider society. Through the internalisation of these ‘impossible dilemmas’, we may have unwittingly become the architects of our own misfortunes that we repeat without knowing why.
My clinical experience is that our perspective on our own difficulties is often restricted or distorted, which hinders their resolution. Sometimes these difficulties are compounded by self-judgment and shame. We may have accepted uncritically the opinions of us held by important figures in our lives, particularly our parents in our early development, who will also have been shaped by their histories and cultural background. Traumatic events may have also negatively impacted on our trust in others and self-image. The less obvious factor of a mismatch of how we feel and how others have responded to us may equally lead to a distorted sense of self.
In all these instances, we can be helped by alternative perspectives and accepting that we have probably tried the best we can with the knowledge and skills we had available to us.