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Psychotherapy in West London

Psychotherapy & Counselling with Marcus Gottlieb

Counselling for Abusive Relationships and Victims of Domestic Violence

No one starts relationships expecting them to turn abusive, but sadly some do. In therapy Marcus will:

  • help you to see how the abuse is affecting you
  • help you build your confidence
  • support you to move forward.

Counselling for Abusive Relationships can provide a vital, safe space for you to unload your feelings, be heard without judgement, and take the time to think clearly about your situation, whatever the precise nature of the abuse you are suffering.

Domestic violence is unacceptable and illegal. Yet victims may endure it for years without telling anyone or seeking help.

Many victims of domestic abuse feel they are in some way to blame for the manner in which they are being treated. This way of thinking may be actively encouraged by the perpetrator and can be an intrinsic part of the abusive pattern of behaviour.

Are you a victim of domestic violence or abuse?

Most domestic violence is committed by men against women. One in four women are abused during their lifetime. However, domestic abuse also takes place where it is the woman who abuses their male partner as well as in same-sex relationships. Domestic abuse has no age limits and can occur in a relationship whatever the age of the partners, and regardless of class, religion or ethnic background.

Rather less well documented, but equally serious, are the problems of abuse between adult siblings, or of parents abusing adult children, or adult children abusing elderly parents.

Am I in an Abusive Relationship?

This section should help you recognise the signs of being in an abusive relationship and the different forms that domestic abuse can take.

Domestic abuse can be inflicted in many different ways, from the common forms of emotional or psychological abuse and physical violence, to more subtle forms of abuse such as intimidation, controlling behaviour, limiting a person’s social freedom or controlling their finances.

These are all actions calculated to reduce your autonomy and make you the servant of the abuser’s ego.

Symptoms of an emotionally abusive relationship

This type of abuse can erode your self-esteem and self-confidence and cut you off from the personal network whose support is crucial for you. For example:

Your partner:

  • belittles you, your efforts and your achievements
  • sulks till they get their own way or until you ‘submit’ or ‘confess’ that you are in the wrong
  • convinces you that you bear responsibility for their actions (in reality, of course, they do)
  • blames you for the entirety of the arguments and problems and make you feel you deserve abuse
  • minimises the significance of the abuse by being dismissive about it
  • drives you to think you are crazy, by denying that the abuse is occurring at all
  • degrades or humiliates you
  • manipulates you
  • isolates you by cutting you off from your family, your friends and your support network
  • makes exaggerated and unreasonable demands for your attention

Threats and intimidation as signs of an abusive relationship

Threats, menaces or intimidation can take away from you any sense of your independence and force you to submit to the abuser’s power and control. Examples could be that your partner:

  • threatens to hurt you
  • destroys objects that belong to you
  • threatens to kill themselves, you, your children or give you reason to fear that they might
  • intimidates you or stands over you so that you feel uncomfortable or intimidated
  • swears at you
  • invades your personal space
  • overrides your boundaries by reading your emails, texts, diary, social media posts or mail
  • harasses you
  • follows you or stalks you (stalking as been described as ‘murder in slow motion’)

Signs of a physically abusive relationship

Physical abuse controls you, exhausts you, bewilders you and makes you increasingly vulnerable and unsafe. It can take many forms, your partner:

  • slaps, punches or hits you
  • pushes or shoves you
  • pinches, pokes or grabs you
  • bites or kicks you
  • uses a weapon against you or so as to cause you alarm and fear
  • burns a part of your body or your clothing or possessions
  • holds you around the neck and/or chokes you, to hurt and control you and so that you fear strangling
  • destroys, breaks or throws objects at you
  • obstructs your path, holds you down, restrains you with force or locks you in
  • directs violent actions not necessarily at you, but in your presence, so that you’re frightened

Signs of a sexually abusive relationship

This type of abuse can shame or humiliate you and reduce your sexual self-confidence and self-confidence generally. For example your partner:

  • touches you in an inappropriate or unwanted way
  • presses you with their sexual demands
  • hurts you during sex
  • pressurises you to have sex and sulk if they do not get sex
  • has unsafe sex with you or with any other person
  • does not inform you fully and promptly of any sexually transmitted infections they acquire
  • assaults or rapes you i.e. have sex or sexual contact with you without your full, clear consent

Financial abuse as an indicator of an abusive relationship

This type of coercive abuse can render you powerless to make your own choices and decisions, e.g.:

  • your partner controls all your finances
  • makes you account for every penny you spend
  • they make all the major financial decisions for you whether you wish that or not

Prioritising action for protection and safety

Victims of domestic abuse may need to leave the abusive person and/or bring charges against them if they have been physically or sexually violent.

This, however, may not be the best option in every case. There are other steps that can be explored, for example leaving temporarily, getting your partner to leave, or supporting your partner to get counselling.

You have an absolute right to live without fear of abuse. Once someone starts to use violence and abuse, it is likely to escalate and get worse, whatever the abuser says.

Changing your behaviour, as the abuser may be demanding, is unlikely to stop the abuse.

You may have become accustomed to feeling resigned, hopeless and overwhelmed by fear – fear of loneliness, fear of violence, fear of the unknown. That is why it can be important to speak to someone like a Domestic Abuse Therapist. Talking through your situation and the violence you are living with can help you to begin to make sense of your situation, enable you to look at your options and discuss your safety in a logical manner.

If you are a survivor of past domestic violence or of abuse within a relationship that has ended, you can often be helped in the process of moving on by discussing the experience in therapy and exploring what you have learned about yourself and your strength and resilience.

Counselling for Abusive Relationships and Domestic Violence

If you are a normal, kindhearted person with lots of love to give, it is natural to make excuses for the person who is hurting you, or to cling to a hope that their true (kind and loving) self will re-emerge. It can be extraordinarily hard to accept that:

  • the abuser is solely responsible for their abusive behaviour and violent actions, and you are not to blame;
  • violence and abuse are choices that the abuser makes, and it is not your fault.

As a relationship counsellor, Marcus understands and empathises with the dilemmas you face and will work supportively and walk alongside you as you get clear and figure out exactly what you need to do next.

Take the first step to stop the domestic abuse or to get out of an abusive relationship or to heal the emotional scars you feel you carry, and contact Marcus to talk about Counselling for Abusive Relationships.

Contact Marcus


Here are some interesting articles and pages on Abusive Relationships that you might find helpful

Counselling Resource
An article called “Love and Stockholm Syndrome: The Mystery of Loving an Abuser” on why we love those who abuse us and the complex relationship between the abuser and the abused … read more

The National Domestic Violence Hotline
An interesting article on Why Couples Counselling may not work in the situation of ‘Domestic Abuse’ … read more

Counselling Sydney
This page helps to explain how we have come to be in this adusive relationship and what we can do … read more

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Therapy for Abuse Victims & Survivors in London

Domestic Abuse and Violence Subjects I Often Work With

  • Adult Victims of Childhood Abuse & Trauma
  • Adults in Abusive Relationships
  • Male Victims of domestic violence
  • Adult Victims of Boarding School Abuse

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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.

Contact Marcus

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