Therapeutic Approach

The therapeutic relationship encourages thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, behaviours, and relational patterns to emerge into therapy sessions.

These emerging aspects of daily experience are often the difficult, or overwhelming challenges for which therapy is sought. However, existing personal strengths, resilience, and resources will also emerge into sessions, to be acknowledged and multiplied in the service of increasing wisdom, freedom, and happiness.

Irrespective of whether these aspects of experience emerge as identifiable, diagnosable mental health concerns, Morgan prefers to pursue a mutual understanding of how these experiences impact on the individual at this particular time, and in the context of their unique developmental, cultural, and social environments. Accordingly, interventions are inherently collaborative, tailored to the specific and unique circumstances of each individual, reflecting a Client-centred, or Humanistic approach.

In the context of this Client-centred approach to counseling and psychotherapy, Morgan has a commitment to utilising a broad range of empirically-validated treatments - interventions and techniques demonstrated as effective by contemporary scientific methods. Accordingly, shorter-term interventions are often informed by variations of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). The CBT utilised includes more traditional approaches, such as psycho-education, Schema-Focused Therapy, cognitive reconsideration, Motivational Interviewing, relaxation strategies, communication and social skills training, and Behavioural Analysis, in addition to ‘third-wave’ CBT, emphasising Mindfulness-based interventions.

Morgan's approach to CBT is influenced by his many years of experience, personal practice, and research into the principles and techniques of mindfulness-based practices and therapies. Mindfulness-based therapies include Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT).

Mindfulness-based interventions encourage the moment-to-moment acceptance of difficult thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations. Sensitive exploration of these experiences will often reveal common themes emphasised in Existential Therapy, including: death, freedom and responsibility, meaning and purpose, and isolation. Exploration and acceptance of these often difficult aspects of experience allows space for the pursuit of committed, values-based, goal-directed actions, creating an increasingly satisfying, meaningful, and happy life.

Morgan also utilises Interpersonal Therapy (ITP) as an evidence-based intervention for depression, emphasising interpersonal themes of complicated bereavement, role disputes and interpersonal conflict, role transitions, and interpersonal skills training. He has extensive experience with Brief Solution-Focused Therapies, identifying and developing an individual’s positive attributes and strengths to achieve a preferred future.

Morgan has a particular interest in the richness and depth of the many theories and practices which may be broadly described as psychodynamic or psychoanalytic, particularly those emphasising the relational, interpersonal, or intersubjective aspects of developmental and current experience. These theories have particular practical relevance for the emphasis Morgan places upon the interpersonal process of therapy, as that process evolves in the context of a therapeutic relationship between therapist and client.

This mutually committed therapeutic engagement deepens understanding and acceptance of self, increasing contentment and ease with life and relationships, through progressive liberation from unconscious influences on our painful, often repetitive experiences and behaviours.