Leo aims to make your counselling experience a safe, rich and rewarding one. In the large part, you are probably not choosing to attend a session because things are in order. This page should help you to determine if Leo could be the right counsellor for you and give you an idea of how counselling and psychotherapy can work if you have never attended before. Ultimately, should you have any questions or wish to learn more, a free 15min phone check-in is available to see if working together is a good fit.
Leo is a welcoming and friendly therapist who’s aim is to welcome all individuals and couples to his practice without judgement or discrimination.
Clients of all ages, genders, faith, nationality, mental health issues, world views and sexual orientation are welcome. Leo primarily works with adults, but will consider clients aged 13-18 depending on the individual and their circumstance.
It can be hard to choose a therapist or understand what is going on, so please read more deeply on this page and all the linked content to help you determine if Leo is the right therapist to explore getting underway with.
There’s all kinds of reasons why you may be seeking therapy. It’s often because how we are inside and how factors are in the world are have become misaligned and its hard to reconcile that. At the tip of the iceberg is often our relationships to and with others have becoming challenging, complex or even destructive.
Or it could be that our relationship with ourselves is also out of sync related to current situations or to our past, or from extenuating circumstances that were not, our are not under our control.
Mental health is a widely used and known term these days, but what does it really mean to have the good version of this?
Individuals coming to therapy may have a single core issue, or it could be a complex entanglement of issues that have in themselves, or through our behaviour and its consequences, become complex enough to need work and potentially, change or transformation.
This could be manifesting simply as anxiety or depression, or in other more complex symptoms, emotions, feelings and behaviours.
Whatever the issue, read on further to see if individual therapy with Leo could feel like a match for you,
whether that be shorter-term counselling for a specific issue, or longer term psychotherapy for more complex insight and resolutions..
Couples, marriage and relational counselling changes the dynamic of practice quite a bit. Here, we are talking about couple’s therapy where the client of the therapist is your relationship.
Leo is extensively trained in, and has found Gottman couples therapy to be the best core model to use in his practice. The model brings and extensive body of knowledge acquired through research with thousands of couples, combined with models and experiential techniques.
These support a couple to lay down new neural pathways for better and less destructive, detrimental patterns of behaviour and relating in a relationship.
Often its our thinking, stuck patterns and nervous system responses that are continually driving bad relational outcomes and replacing these with insight and understanding, along with skills and excercises to support change and reinforcing its permanence is the purpose of therapy.
Leo has worked with many couples over the course of his practice and alongside a Gottman framework, Leo is interested in the context of your relationship to help identify issues.
This could include external and internal factors and other techniques and models can also help the journey such as attachment, psychodynamics, Emotionally-Focused, family systems and models of personality and mental health such as the enneagram and Schema therapy are some of Leo’s core tools.
Please click below to learn more about whether couples counselling with Leo could help save your relationship.
Leo has long been a provider of services via Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) and currently mainly contracts for Acacia EAP, and occasionally for Eudoxia and Workplace Options.
For Work Cover, if your claim is approved in NSW, Victoria and Queensland you can book a session directly with Leo who will assist you with psychological support, recovery and related challenges with the claims process.
Leo is a registered provider with iCare NSW, WorkSafe Victoria and WorkSafe QLD.
Leo is further registered to provide support services for accident recovery in NSW and Victoria and is registered with NSW SIRA and the Victorian Transport Accident Commision (TAC) as a provider.
Well this is a bit of a complex one to explain, but if you are looking for a deeper journey, then you have come to the right place. As noted, many people are focused on problems and solutions. This happens on levels of what we are aware of.
An example of this could be I feel anxious and I hate feeling this way and I want it to stop, the therapist to make it stop. A next level to this could be the realisation that part of what causes distress from chronic anxiety is how we feel about, and the fight we are locked into with our anxiety.
Changing our relationship to our anxiety and working to understand its roots and causes can be ways to dissolve it or enter into a place of greater acceptance of our anxiety and insight that can help us commit more to ourselves and let compassion replace rejection of ourselves and our experience.
Where counselling can focus on a short term dialogue, psychotherapy can look more deeply at experience, cause and effect.
For some of us, knowing ourselves deeper and more richly is one of the deep and rewarding experiences of personalisation and being a richer human being. The joy and presence that comes from this can lead to a bit of a hunger to want to know more, personally, but also interpersonally and even transpersonally.
In that, therapy for self-realisation not only seeks to improve our inner and interpersonal lives, it also gives us the tools and holding to achieve these richer personal, and even spiritual goals.
Based on his on life journey, Leo was drawn from 2004 and during his studies to both the western and eastern hemispheres of human thinking and studies of psychology, spirituality and consciousness.
With big questions to be answered and a hunger to find the truth of life, experience and existence, Leo was drawn quickly to some of the best voices on all of this.
One of the first things that came to be understood was that it all does, and can only happen is in the now and all change and insight arises in the moment.
There are many maps on many levels to the territory and theorists and practitioners such as Ken Wilber and AH Almaas started to bring some clarity, or at least a map to the jungle.
Leo has studied and practiced many maps. Bringing them all together, or integrating them, is pretty key to a therapist’s attunement to working with clients where they are at, while recognising also that our clients are experts in their own lives, just needing a little help to navigate the jungle too!
Making the decision, or even becoming aware and accepting that you need to talk about a challenging issue or emotion can be daunting. Even more daunting can be seeking help with it and meeting with a stranger to do so, regardless of whether they are a paid professional.
If you’d like some more guidance on this and what some of the terms mean, or how to go about choosing a therapist, click on below and read away!
A full hour
Your appointment with Leo runs for the full hour or the time you booked
Flexibility
Easy bookings, payments and modes of therapy
Meeting you where you are
No rigid adherence to a single type of therapy or limited to evidence-based therapies like CBT
what
makes things different
Therapy should be about you and in the moment. Here’s how we aim to provide a rich, flexible and integrative experience.
question?
or ready to book?
Have a question or want a chat about what it could be like to work together?