About psychotherapy
Psychotherapy can help you understand yourself better, develop as a person and help you begin taking new initiatives. Psychotherapy can encompass work on your life’s vision and fulfillment whilst working in a very focused way on identifying and changing unhelpful thoughts, emotions and unwanted behavior. It can offer you the opportunity to manage your daily stressors with more ease, alleviate suffering, understand your social environment better and help you build healthy resources for your further development.
Each psychotherapy process is unique and each relies on close collaboration between you and your therapist. The success of therapy depends both on the skill of therapist and your input. Building blocks of successful therapy include a number of interpersonal factors. Your therapist needs to provide a safe and comfortable environment, be fully emotionally present, accepting and respectful towards you and on your side it helps if you are willing to speak openly, challenge yourself and be committed to this journey.
Psychotherapy can be short-term, lasting anywhere from 6 to 10 or somewhat longer 15 to 20 sessions. It can also include a long-term commitment of varying lengths and intensity. The length will depend on the nature of your problem, the established goals, the level of the needed support and the depth of desired change. Some people are eager to learn new coping tools that will help them deal with their current problems, while some need more time to learn to deal effectively with the psychological consequences of their past experiences or life challenges.
First consultation before starting psychotherapy/counselling
Dr. Bojic starts with an initial consultation interview to assess your needs and to collaboratively determine your suitability for counseling, psychotherapy or coaching. The initial consultation typically consists of gathering information about your concerns, including your psychosocial history and the impact of your concerns on your daily life or functioning. During the first consultation Dr. Bojic typically determines the focus of therapy, areas that require further work as well as your strengths. At times the first consultation does not lead to further counseling. In those instances appropriate referrals are made. Sometimes the first assessment session includes gathering more detailed information about your symptoms and associated risks to determine if a diagnosis if appropriate. You will be encouraged to participate actively, ask questions or add any information about yourself that you consider relevant.
Psychological approach of Dr. Bojic
In psychotherapy Dr. Bojic pays attention to the quality of the mutual working relationship, your processing of emotional experience. and her own resonance with your experience. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that a number of psychotherapy approaches can be equally effective if they are conducted in the atmosphere of the strong therapeutic alliance. Without the solid bond between you and your therapist even the best therapeutic strategies would not be successful in bringing out desired outcomes. Dr. Bojic also works on supporting and developing positive attitudes and helps you develop your own creative or healing potentials. She strives to work on transforming difficult, unhelpful cognitive-emotional patterns and on developing social intelligence. In short, her psychotherapy approach can best be described as humanistic, emotion focused and relational. Dr. Bojic has also been trained in cognitive based therapies (CBT-E and NLP) which she uses when therapeutically appropriate.
Counselling vs. psychotherapy
There is no clear, officially agreed upon distinction between counselling and psychotherapy. Some professionals use these terms interchangeably while others consider counselling to be more practically focused on life challenges that appear normally in different life stages ( e.g. leaving home and adjusting to university, first job, starting a family, work problems etc.). Both counselling and psychotherapy can be more or less directive depending on the approach of the therapist.
Coaching
Coaching is a facilitative relationship mainly oriented towards future and improving performance. It targets an area of personal, career or business management development using knowledge based in behavioural sciences. However, the role of the coach is not that of a therapist as its aim is not to explore and work on your past issues. Coach provides consistent, clear and strong feedback targeted towards fulfilling your career or life's goals.