Culture isn’t just our ethnic heritage. It’s also our socioeconomic statuses, our faiths, our families, our workplaces, our nationalities, and more. We all were born and now live in relational systems, and part of the work that counsellors from Eastgate do is to work with our clients in developing ways of understanding, living within, and even changing the cultures that have shaped us.

Part of psychological health derives from spiritual health. Different counsellors from Eastgate will have different levels of experience and comfort in addressing the faith/spiritual backgrounds of our clients. Some counsellors have theological training from Christian seminaries and others have a lifetime of lived experience with different institutions. However, every counsellor at Eastgate adheres to the ideal that sessions are centered on the client’s experience and priorities, and as such, we would only discuss faith and spirituality at a client’s behest.

The easiest way to understand psychodynamic psychotherapy is that it’s all about your relationships: with your family, your friends, with yourself, with the institutions to which you belong, and with your image of God. Psychodynamic work focuses on gaining insight into these relationships and how they’ve formed you, and seeks to open new horizons for you to live differently within them. The predominant and well-publicized approach of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) seeks to help people change their lives by way of changing their thoughts and  behaviours. CBT can be helpful in mitigating acute symptoms. Although counsellors at Eastgate have training and experience with CBT, we employ them under the umbrella of psychodynamic psychotherapy, which aims to create and restore good within all the contexts in which we live.