Psychotherapy

Besides personal contact in my practice (preferred) or outdoors in nature, in motion, it is also possible to work online (e.g. Zoom) – for instance during illness or when you are travelling (stay abroad).

I work in individual therapy with adults and adolescents, and I offer sport psychotherapy, couples therapy and family therapy. I work in English and German.
I am registered and certified:
- on the official register of psychotherapists (Integrative Gestalt Therapy) of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Health (BMG)
- psychotherapist for adolescents (BMG);
- and a member of the Austrian Federal Association for Psychotherapy (ÖBVP).

• What is psychotherapy?
• Your benefit
• Process and investment
• When should you turn to a psychotherapist?
• Sport psychotherapy
• What is self-awareness work (Selbsterfahrung)?

What is psychotherapy?

Psychotherapy (Integrative Gestalt Therapy) means working on your own development and on your own life difficulties and life questions, in a protected and trusting setting, with professionally trained and benevolent therapeutic support.
You work, for example, on your attitudes and views in order to change your behaviour and so gain more options for action and more helpful life strategies. Since attitudes and behaviour are also the result of your life story and the experiences connected with it, your life story is an important part of therapy. How you have integrated your experiences and how they show up in your life and relationships – with which (survival) strategies and solutions you have shaped and coped with your life so far – is a central theme in therapy.
Psychotherapy in the form of Integrative Gestalt Therapy does not simply want to explain the origins of difficulties, but to try out something new (new ways of solving things). Instead of the sometimes tormenting search for knowledge about the “why”, it prefers feeling the “how”, which sets change in motion. Therapy supports an authentic way of dealing with yourself in the moment, in the “here and now”. Feelings arising in the situation bring “old”, familiar behaviour patterns to life, so that they can be worked through.
In our work together you can rely on my interest, my understanding, my empathy for your world of experience, my acceptance and appreciation, and my professional support. It matters to me that, besides the seriousness and effort of therapeutic work, humour is not neglected.

The exact course of a psychotherapy session is not fixed; it depends on you and on how we work together. Your concerns and topics come first. In Integrative Gestalt Therapy the process develops at the beginning through conversation, “talking about”, towards an experience-oriented approach, where personal boundaries can be expanded through “experimenting” and “trying out something new”, and development is thereby supported.
The aim is the transfer and integration of what you sense, experience and recognise in therapeutic practice into your personal everyday life. To influence this personal development positively, it is important that you are seriously willing to face the difficulties openly and to actively work on changing them (with my therapeutic support).

The respective goal of psychotherapy is discussed at the start of our work together. This goal can develop or change in the course of therapy. It often happens that “other things” gain priority as you develop and move to the foreground. Psychotherapy is often a longer-term process.

What is your benefit – what can psychotherapy achieve?

Here is a selection of experiences; it makes no claim to completeness.

• Your symptoms improve or subside.
• You create more opportunities to enjoy life; your quality of life rises.
• You gain more independence.
• You create more freedom in everyday life.
• You reduce your suffering and your burdens.
• You increase your well-being.
• Your self-efficacy and self-esteem grow.
• You can shape your relationships and contacts with other people more successfully.
• Your options for action and coping strategies expand.
• Your psychological stability increases.
• You achieve more self-expression and less convention.

Process and investment

In my experience it usually makes sense for psychotherapy to take place once a week; one session lasts 50 minutes. A partial refund is possible, which you can apply for with your health insurance fund (depending on the fund, roughly €33 to €50; please ask your insurer). If you have private insurance, it may be possible to use it.

Contact me and arrange a free initial meeting. It is for getting to know each other and for information about investment, frequency, duration, process and cancellation terms, as well as for clarifying your concern and the offers I can make. This initial meeting takes 20 minutes. Start times between 9:20 am and 4:30 pm are generally possible on weekdays.

When should you turn to a psychotherapist?

Anyone who suffers from personal difficulties or emotional strain and can no longer cope with them alone should seek professional support and help, just as with physical illness. This can be clarified in an initial meeting (free of charge for you).
I would like to add: it is a good “investment” in yourself to come to therapy sooner rather than later. Experience shows that you save quite a lot of (treatment) time that way!

Here is a selection; it makes no claim to completeness.
If one or more of the following statements apply to you, it makes sense to arrange an initial meeting.

• You have physical complaints (migraine, heart complaints, regular diarrhoea or non-specific vegetative symptoms such as trembling, sweating, nausea, etc.), yet your doctor confirms that you are organically healthy.
• You have a relationship or marriage problem – you are unhappy with your relationship and are looking for ways to change it.
• You would like to be in a relationship (perhaps you suffer from heartbreak), but so far it has not worked out.
• You have separated (and suffer from the pain of separation) or want to separate and wonder how to go on.
• You would like to (finally) start couples therapy with your partner.
• You often think: “I can’t go on like this – something in my life has to change – I can’t bear it any longer.”
• You want to work on your insecurity and lack of self-confidence.
• You feel exhausted and suffer from sleeplessness.
• You take no joy in life and feel an emptiness inside – friends say you are depressed.
• Depression, anxiety or panic attacks are familiar “companions”.
• You have had painful experiences in your life that will not let go of you and keep catching up with you.
• You struggle with the everyday demands of life, chaos keeps breaking out, you feel overwhelmed and have trouble managing daily life.
• You want to work on your lack of assertiveness.
• You are often under great inner tension and feel afraid.
• You feel anxious, down and sad.
• You cannot stop thinking about certain things or repeatedly doing certain things (e.g. washing hands, cleaning, etc.).
• You find yourself (your body) ugly and repulsive, eat too much or not at all, or repeatedly vomit.
• You cannot stop consuming alcohol, drugs or medication, or gambling, shopping, etc.
• You have sexual difficulties.
• You have lost an important person in your life or are about to, and do not know how life should go on.
• You often feel insecure, have little confidence in yourself and are afraid of other people.
• You withdraw from other people and have hardly any contact with others.
• You suffer from “burnout” or an experience of bullying (mobbing).
• You have lost your job or are about to, and feel disoriented and discouraged.
• You have managed a stressful life situation over recent years (caring for relatives, the death of a family member, etc.) or have worked a great deal, and now feel burnt out and exhausted, perhaps with physical symptoms.

Sport psychotherapy

(In the following text I use both the male and the female form; both are always meant.)

Sport psychotherapy is an extension of the above with a special focus on the world of (elite) athletes, and often also former (elite) athletes (now coaches, or parents of athletes).
There are many scenarios in which athletes seek psychotherapeutic help. What matters to me is a holistic approach! Athletes I work or have worked with tell me that exactly this was very helpful for them. They say they feel perceived as a “whole”, not “only” as an athlete but also in all the other roles in their private world (e.g. as partner, student, father/mother, brother/sister, son/daughter, ...). They report that it helped them especially to work on their personal growth beyond sport, which in turn often made them more successful in sport – because success then sometimes no longer “had to” happen, which in turn led to success often happening after all, because it no longer had to be but could be. Sometimes the grim determination fades and more lightness enters life.
Successes carried by this “new” lightness are then experienced “differently” by the athlete. Some say they are more valuable because they were truly won for oneself. Athletes have then often learned to stay more with themselves. “Staying with yourself” is a frequent theme in therapeutic work that comes to the surface again and again from different angles and is worked on.
At the start of our work, beliefs such as “only those who work hard succeed” often crystallise. Understood “intrapsychically”, this means that some people work “too” hard with, or rather on, themselves – “simply setting the bar too high”. In therapeutic work we then examine how this developed. Because nobody came into the world like that, ...
When you take this approach and, coming from the bigger picture, move into the area of sport, it sometimes starts with the fact that, while growing up, “well-meant” tips, advice and demands from “companions” around the athlete give rise to less well-meaning “brakes” inside the athlete. Beliefs are “laid down”, and “brakes” such as perfectionism, (too) high expectations from the environment (and from the athlete), overpowering or overinvesting, fear of failure, despair (e.g. after yet another injury) are often built up from childhood on, without the “budding” athlete being aware of it. This happens all by itself. Subsequently, problem areas can develop such as depressive moods or depression, phobias/anxiety disorders, burnout, sleep disorders, addiction problems and psychosomatic illnesses (this list makes no claim to completeness).
These brakes, acquired in many layers, then sometimes sabotage all (other) areas of life – not only the efforts to move forward in training and competition. In sport psychotherapy I offer to support you in working out a psychological state that largely frees you from these brakes. The shared therapeutic work should help you pursue and reach your goals again with more quality of life (commitment, self-confidence, dedication and confidence).

What is self-awareness work (Selbsterfahrung)?

The difference between self-awareness work and psychotherapy is only one of degree. Usually it is the level of suffering, or the symptoms already formed, that decides whether we speak of self-awareness work or psychotherapy.
Self-awareness work also means working on your own development and your own life difficulties and life questions in a protected and trusting setting, with professionally trained and benevolent “therapeutic” support. It follows the idea of personal growth and further development. It is about “looking beyond the edge of your plate”, trying out something new and widening your personal radius of action, and thereby gaining a broader spectrum of views, approaches and behaviours. The aim is, for example, more calm, contentment and quality of life. Under professional guidance, and drawing on psychotherapeutic approaches and methods, you engage with yourself.
Trainee psychotherapists in Integrative Gestalt Therapy, for instance, complete one hundred and twenty hours of individual self-awareness work during their training, in line with legal requirements.