for mental and emotional health
Counselling and Psychotherapy in Woodford, East London

Human Givens is Practical, Proven, Holistic and Scientific

Human Givens is the newest and most radical school of psychotherapy in 40 years. This rapidly expanding approach, rooted in the very latest scientific understandings, is UK based and dates just from the late 1990s.

Already there is hard evidence that Human Givens is more effective and faster than traditional counselling/psychotherapy (including CBT, which is favoured now in the NHS).

Human Givens has been called the first true Bio Psycho Social model of Psychotherapy. Human Givens trained practitioners understand the causes and relief of mental distress and also the route to emotional health, emotional intelligence, resilience and wellbeing.

The Human Givens approach

All of us have Needs and all of us have Resources to help meet these needs. One might say that this is what defines us - our Human Givens.
We obviously require security, food and shelter, but we have emotional needs also - for intimacy, privacy, attention, for meaning in our lives and to belong. Resources include our thinking brain, our imagination, a sense of empathy, the ability to dream and to stand outside ourselves and observe our emotions.

And so it is very simple.
Individuals are emotionally healthy when their resources are working effectively to meet needs. Conversely, individuals suffer - be it from depression, anxieties, addictions or psychosis - when resources are misused or have been damaged or are overwhelmed by circumstances so that needs are not met.

Therapists trained in the Human Givens begin from this Organizing Idea.
It is simple, powerful and yet so different from the models to which the majority (lay people and mental health practitioners) continue to subscribe. These models either see mental disturbance as a sickness of the brain, which can be diagnosed and treated with carefully targeted drugs or as requiring long-term insight talking therapy so to uncover the assumed hidden cause.

Human Givens therapists

• Learn of the essential role of dreaming to maintain emotional health.
  
• Understand that habits create patterns which if inappropriate, influence our emotions such that these can overwhelm desirable thinking and actions.
  
• Strive to make effective use of a range of tools and methods to help clients shift unhelpful patterns and empower them to use their own resources to meet their essential needs.