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  • Psychotherapy in West London
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Psychotherapy in West London

Psychotherapy & Counselling with Marcus Gottlieb

Addiction Counselling & OCD Therapy in London

Therapy for addictive and obsessive-compulsive behaviour disorders with Marcus

Addictions and Obsessive Behaviour are more than just ‘bad habits’. They can really ruin your enjoyment of life and dominate your existence. When thoughts and desires turn into cravings that wholly consume your attention, you are moving towards addictive or obsessive behaviour. People commonly try to fix themselves using willpower alone, and if that fails it can simply increase a sense of frustration and hopelessness. Working with a counsellor skilled in Addiction Counselling & OCD Therapy can help.

“When you open your eyes, the first person you bump into is you.” David Schnarch, psychologist and psychotherapist

Examples of Addictions and Addictive Behaviour:

  • Smartphone addiction (or other technology devices)
  • Alcohol consumption, in excess
  • Porn, in excess
  • Prescription or recreational drugs
  • Particular foods or food groups
  • Over-stimulation, e.g. thrill-seeking activities, dangerous sports

Examples of Compulsive Behaviour:

  • Overuse of social media
  • Gambling, to excess
  • Any type of bingeing

Examples of OCD Behaviour:

  • Repetitive, overattentive cleaning and washing – of a flat, a car, a restaurant table or yourself
  • Checking locks over and over
  • Checking appliances are switched off, over and over
  • Checking the ground for syringes, inappropriately and with high anxiety
  • Straightening objects, pictures, rugs etc.
  • Chewing hair, and other self-harm

Examples of Obsessive Behaviour:

  • Ruminating or speculating about a person, ‘needing’ to know where they are and who they are with
  • Continuous, anxiety-inducing thoughts about someone or something to the exclusion of all else
  • Controlling, monitoring or stalking
  • Phobias and the avoidance strategies that support them
  • Overly rigid dependence on routines

What do Addiction, Obsession and OCD have in common?

These are really the same type of experience, because they involve behaviours you do without wanting to.

You are in some way choosing to do them, but it doesn’t feel that way at all. What you feel is obligated – carried along with a sense of immediate urgency – to behave in ways you know don’t serve you well. There’s no pausing and considering. You can’t help yourself.

Whether for you it’s:

  • lighting a cigarette (Addiction or Compulsive Behaviour)
  • constant handwashing (OCD)
  • continuously thinking about someone in a way that’s inappropriate, disproportionate and damaging (Obsession)

your mind and body are trying to satisfy a craving for pleasure, peace, relief or safety.

But why is this compulsive behaviour a cause for concern?

The problem is the craving – the powerful, irrational, harmful desire to do something, to possess someone or to consume something that your brain has learned gives you pleasure, calm and relief.

A neurotransmitter or chemical messenger called dopamine affects the experience of desire and has the ability to ‘wire in’ new reward pathways in the brain. It also consolidates and reinforces those pathways once your brain has established that a particular activity or substance induces pleasure in you.

The more you feel dopamine-induced pleasure, the more you want to repeat the experience. A vicious cycle forms. Thanks to levels of ‘tolerance’ that rise each time, you have to do or consume the thing more and more to achieve the same degree of pleasure. Desire for the person, substance or activity becomes an overwhelming urge you are powerless to resist.

The ‘pleasure’ is usually pretty low-level, just enough to get the dopamine cycle going. Being aware that the pleasure is never very great only adds to the frustration of being stuck in the experience of obsession and compulsion. That itself adds to the self-reinforcing nature of addictions, obsessions and compulsions.

These challenges are becoming ever more common, even though a few of the triggers, such as nicotine, appear to be on the wane. Sugar addiction, online gambling addiction, the compulsive use of internet porn, an OCD relationship to social media or to gaming, ‘iPhone addiction’ and issues with prescription drugs or with ‘legal highs’, are all serious and growing problems.

“I feel that I gained a great deal of insight and personal stability during those 6 months last year, for which I am very grateful.” – T

How does OCD Therapy and Addiction Counselling work?

In order to lower anxiety levels and to reverse the wiring in the brain that keeps reinforcing the compulsions, obsessions or addictions, Marcus uses cognitive and behavioural therapy techniques as well as a broad range of tools from formative psychology, gestalt therapy, psychosynthesis and Pesso-Boyden Therapy.

His work incorporates an understanding, which can be particularly relevant with obsessive-compulsive behaviour and addiction, of early trauma and shame. He also draws on Twelve Steps ‘Anonymous Fellowships’ (like AA, NA, OA and SLAA) and the ways in which their methods and approaches strengthen and support your Will to heal.

Addiction Counselling & OCD Therapy in London with Marcus

If you want to kick habits and move on with your life in a more fruitful and satisfying way, contact Marcus to talk about Addictions Counselling and OCD Therapy for Compulsive Behaviour.

 

Contact Marcus


Some helpful articles and web pages on Addictions & Obsessive Behaviour

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Pesso Boyden Group with accredited practitioners Deborah Clarke and Marcus Gottlieb

Pesso Boyden Group with accredited PBSP practitioners Deborah Clarke and Marcus Gottlieb

Pesso Boyden Therapy (‘PBSP’) is a philosophical process for becoming whole.

It is a respectful, interactive group process that heals by embedding new memories in the brain and in the body

Most people consciously or unconsciously have memories – explicit or implicit – of 

1. deficits 

2. traumas 

3. having to take care of others when we were too young – e.g. protecting a sibling, providing the joy in the life of an unhappy parent, unconsciously becoming the ‘spouse’ of a widowed parent, or making the world right after hearing stories of injustice. 

When any of these three categories of memory appear in the client’s work, the client and therapist work together to externalise them, in order to illuminate the client’s ways of handling life and to facilitate change. The client is always in charge of this process – people and incidents from the client’s past will be symbolised in the here-and-now either by people in the group or by objects in the room, all chosen and placed by the client. 

The therapist then works with the client to facilitate an antidote to what happened in the past – a new memory which provides what the client needed at that particular time in their past, from a specific kinship figure. This new memory may be developed over several sessions in a number of steps. In the Pesso approach we don’t change our history; however, we do change our response to our history, leading to a new perspective. 

The way is opened to possibilities of greater pleasure, satisfaction, meaning, integration and connectedness.

 



Deborah has worked as a Performance Coach for over 16 years having trained with Coach U. Her background is in the arts as an actor, theatre director and artistic director. She has worked with a wide range of people from all walks of life. Having first encountered Pesso Boyden as a client, she felt inspired to do the training herself. Since graduating in 2013 she has been running Personal Development workshops using the Pesso Boyden system and is now accredited by the official PBSP U.K. organisation.

Notting Hill Therapist | Marcus Gottlieb Psychotherapist & Counsellor
Marcus Gottlieb is a highly experienced London-based psychotherapist with a particular interest in boarding school survivor syndrome. Having trained alongside Deborah directly under Al Pesso and his closest collaborator Lowijs van Perquin, he is steeped in the work of PBSP and a strong believer in the client’s genetic impulse towards health and expression of their unique potential and individual destiny. He became an accredited Pesso Boyden therapist in 2021.
An Introduction to the Pesso Boyden Method

 

An opportunity to learn about and observe the distinctive techniques of this respectful body-based psychotherapy.

Suitable for both psychologically interested professionals, people seeking personal development/CPD and for people not in the therapeutic professions seeking to address entrenched issues. For all those who are interested in living a larger life. A special price of £35 for the day includes lunch and refreshments. CPD certificates will be available.

PBSP (Pesso-Boyden System Psychomotor) is a powerful, deeply respectful, psychotherapeutic process that uses feedback, ritual, objects and role players in a unique manner to heal the traumas, wounds and losses that affect our personal map of the world.

Its central goal is the imaginative creation of an ‘ideal’ healthy past that a person’s brain processes so that they emerge feeling differently about themselves. As Albert Pesso said, ‘Humanity is responsible for the meaning that surrounds us. The task for each person is to create a meaningful life and then live it with existential courage and passion.’

As well as gaining new perspectives, clients often experience increased pleasure, satisfaction, meaning and connectedness following a PBSP session and find themselves psychologically freer to make the changes they wish for in their lives.
Date: Saturday 7 October 2017
Venue: Notting Hill, London W11
Time: 10.00 am – 4.30 pm
Cost: £35 (inc lunch & refreshments)

 

Register Your Interest


Boarding School Survivor Syndrome Conference

BOARDING SCHOOL: Surviving the Syndrome
Broken Attachment and Childhood Trauma

University of Brighton

Saturday 9 September 2017
9.30 am to 5.00 pm

Conference for psychotherapists, counsellors, mental health workers, boarding school survivors and other interested people.

Conference overall aims are to:
§ Present key aspects of what has been published about the psychological and other effects of boarding.
§ Explore helpful therapeutic approaches for clients who are former boarders.
§ Consider current research and a possible agenda for future research
§ Enable networking amongst those interested in this important topic

Chair: Pam Howard, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton.

Speakers: Nick Duffell, Joy Schaverien, Alex Renton, Thurstine Basset, Anni Townend, Olya Khaleelee.

Group Discussion Facilitators: Marcus Gottlieb, Leslie Lund, Nicola Miller, Simon Partridge, Boarding Concern Directors.

For more details, contact Laura Williams:
southcoastevents@brighton.ac.uk

Pesso Boyden Workshop with Ana María Ruiz Sancho and Marcus Gottlieb

 

Pesso Boyden Therapy is a respectful and highly respected, body-based psychotherapy with distinctive techniques aimed at addressing entrenched issues. It is an interactive process that creates new body-based memories to heal emotional deficits of the past.

An exceptionally powerful personal development tool, it uses feedback, systematic procedures, objects and role players in a unique methodology, in order to repair the early traumas, wounds and losses that can powerfully influence the brain’s map of the world.

In shifting underlying perspectives, the way is opened to the possibility of greater pleasure, satisfaction, meaning and connectedness, and an enhanced freedom to effect longed-for changes.

It is expected there will be between 8 and 12 participants, with an absolute maximum of 15. The day will start with an explanation of Pesso Boyden and an experiential introduction, followed by 4 actual client sessions of an hour each.

Venue: Philadelphia Association, 4 Marty’s Yard, London NW3 1QW
Date: Saturday 3 June 2017
Time: 0930 to 1800
Cost: £75

Register Your Interest



Ana María Ruiz Sancho is an experienced psychiatrist and a psychotherapist. She is also a specialist in group dynamics and an Institutional and Team Motivation Consultant.

Ana is the Founder and a Director of VocAcción, as well as being a qualified Pesso Boyden psychotherapist.


Notting Hill Therapist | Marcus Gottlieb Psychotherapist & Counsellor

Marcus Gottlieb works with relationships, sexuality, abuse and trauma, with a particular interest in boarding school survivor syndrome. Qualified in Pesso Boyden as well as other psychotherapies, he is also an Alexander Technique teacher.

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