What kind of problems can you help me with?
Anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, stress, and many other areas of mental and emotional difficulty!
We recognise that life can be difficult for all of us from time to time. We can help with these difficulties whether it is a temporary crisis or life transition, ongoing emotional distress, the aftermath of trauma, the stresses and growing pains of life or the wish for a more fulfilling everyday experience; OTS can help to find an appropriate, effective and affordable therapeutic route for you.
Whether there is a clear diagnosis (like stress, depression, anxiety, etc) or an unlabelled experience of emotional or mental pain, or just a ‘felt sense’ that 'things could be better'; whether it is an identified outer problem, a relationship difficulty or an inner sense of turmoil, confusion or emptiness, there are many more ways of addressing the psychological challenges of life than the average person knows about – OTS aims to make that accumulated richness of human understanding and wisdom available to everybody seeking help.
OTS have a wide range of counsellors and psychotherapists including those offering low cost counselling across the Oxford & Witney regions.
Information for Referring & Practicing Professionals
At OTS, we believe in maximum diversity and choice for clients and patients, and helping them make informed choices, with as little professional and self-serving bias as possible. In order to achieve this, we advocate transparent communication and co-operation between different services, agencies and disciplines. We support the increasing integration, cross-fertilisation and mutual understanding between different helping professions, and to this end offer specific resources and information about the different types and formats of counselling and psychotherapy to our colleagues across the various disciplines.
(Further Information)
The PsychoEducational Blog
Welcome to our blog - To help develop our understanding of human nature and the challenge of changing how life is. We will add new thinking to this blog at the beginning of each month so you can check back for the next instalment!
Jan 2025: The Brain, the Nervous System & Change - part 1.
Change is sometimes easy to make - If we get tired of watching the ITV news, we can give the BBC a go. But most change that we seek to address (often through therapy) has varying degrees of difficulty, as you probably know. There are many complex reasons for this, and many different theories (hundreds in fact) that the psychological professions have come up with to try to understand why and what can help overcome the difficulty. All these theories hold some value and some truth, but just like with the laws of physics and ideas in economics, none of them are complete.
You have possibly come across the idea that the human brain is the most complex structure that we know of in the universe. In recent years neuroscientists have understood more to confirm this reality. We now know, that we are born with around 86 billion neurons in our brain, which then connect with each other on multiple levels as we experience life and develop an understanding for how the world works. These connections form a neural network, with more synaptic connections between the neurons than there are stars in the universe. And all this by the age of 5.
So, when people come seeking counselling and psychotherapy at our Oxford & Witney centres, sometimes they don't always appreciate why change can be so difficult. But, when we think about the complexity of the brain which I have just outlined, which forms alongside our nervous system during the first years of life, you begin to appreciate why neuroscientist are now confirming what Freud was theorising about 120 years ago, that we are predominantly 'unconscious'.
More on this next month...
Feb 2025: The Brain, the Nervous System & Change - part 2.
Last month, we referenced the neuroscience which now appreciates that the vast majority of the structure of your brain and nervous system as you read this text formed by the age of 5. But if we asked you to write a book about all you could remember of those first 5-years, how big a book could you write? Most people, when we ask them this question would answer with, a page or two at most; with some people saying they have no memory of this brain and nervous system forming time at all.
There is a concept called ‘Neuroplasticity’, which refers to the ability of the brain to change through further experiences beyond the age of 5, and throughout life. We know that with new information for example, our opinions can change. Some opinions are however, more resilient than others. A good example would be with voting in general elections. ‘Floating Voters’ are known as such because their vote changes from one election to another. For others, they would never vote anything other than conservative, or labour. Why is there this difference between floating and committed voters?
For the purpose of this blog, let us imagine that a client came to therapy because they were a fixed voter, and wanted to become a floating voter (or vice versa), and they wanted us to help them with this problem. At this point, we don’t need to develop an understanding of why someone would have a problem like this - after all, it is often the case that we don’t understand the problems other people have at all. We are really just fleshing out some of the landscape as to why change might be difficult, and how we might begin to think about it with this voting client. So, between now and next month’s blog, you might consider reasons why some people are floating voters and some are not, and what the implications are for the therapist they want help from.
