Our desire for certainty and solidness guides our values and beliefs, so coming to terms with ‘not knowing’ may seem to betray our values. Life’s uncertainty and unpredictability challenge our desire for security and control against the backdrop of the world; this paradoxical human tension generates ‘anxiety’.
The Principle of Uncertainty: uncertainty is present not only in surprising events of our lives but just and equally and forcefully in the expected and seemingly fixed meanings and circumstances of everyday life (Spinelli, 2015). We can get accustomed to our anxiety that it can entwined with our identity. This is the anxiety of not having certainty and control over our choices.
Right: ‘Seat of Uncertainty’ by Susan Paterson
But don’t we have choices?
We have choices, but the fear of making bad decisions makes us manipulate our environment and circumstances to fit the anxious picture of ‘not having certainty/control’. This is what is called Bad Faith by Jean-Paul Satre, the 20th-century existential French philosopher.
We need a ‘reality check’ to evaluate our options and examine our life choices in their fluctuating twists and turns.
Human Map of Existence
Spiritual Realm of Existence (Experience): This is the ideal world with its spiritual dimensions of beliefs and aspirations where the person is likely to refer to values beyond herself and make sense of her existence.”
Physical Realm of Existence (Experience): Entailing the physical, biological dimensions, the natural or physical world is where the person is likely to behave in an instinctual manner.
Personal Realm of Existence (Experience): This is human’s private world with its psychological dimension of intimate and personal experience where a person is likely to have a sense of identity and ownership.
Social Realm of Existence (Experience): This is what human knows as ‘The public’ with its social dimension of human relationships and interactions where the person is likely to behave in a learnt, cultured manner.”
The Art & Science of Psychotherapy
The subject matter of psychology is human being as an embodied consciousness, body, and psyche as spatiotemporal realities. Building upon this science of psyche, psychotherapy addresses human beings and their lifeworld deriving their validity not from the presupposed superstructure of natural sciences, but rather from within the experience. In this sense, psychotherapy is a scientific endeavour, not because therapeutic techniques should be empirically supported and rooted in falsifiable models of the psychological problem that is being treated (Hoffmann &Weinberger, 2007), but because psychotherapists apply the rigorous science of experience to bring about change.
Psychotherapy is an art like activity as it implies esthetic judgment when encountering the other as the client. The other person in the therapeutic relationship is not to be experienced in the manner that one experiences the perceptual, objective world. The creativity and flexibility of psychotherapists in addressing their client underpin the Levinasian notion of ‘welcoming the other’ (Cooper, 2009) , which is the moral experience of the other, who is the client. Being attuned to the client in psychotherapy is the manifestation of being aware of one’s own prejudices and letting the client guide the intersubjective therapeutic experience of healing and self-awareness. Therefore, the therapeutic relation is a craft that is tailored artistically to fit every client with the fabric of science of experience (O’ Donohue, Cumming & Cummings, 2006).
When Things Go Awry, We Are Here to Help
From a philosophical & phenomenological perspective, human distress is not simply a pathological condition or an abstract mental state but a lived, embodied experience that fundamentally alters the way we perceive and engage with the world. We invite you to examine the ways in which distress reshapes your relationship to yourself, others, time, space, and meaning. Together we aim to:
- Explore how distress is experienced, not just why it happens.
- Validate the your unique perspective, helping you articulate and reflect on such experience.
- Reconnect you to a sense of meaning, possibility, and agency.
Ultimately we do not sees distress as a failure or deficiency but as a profound, though painful, encounter with the challenges of existence. This perspective honours the depth and complexity of the human condition.
Life Transition
Life transitions such as moving, changing jobs, starting or ending a relationship and other major events can evoke feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, fear or even depression and lack of motivation. Transitions disrupt pre-established routines and normalities and, with this, trigger stress, challenge our coping and adjusting abilities, and result in a sense of loss of control.
Therapy Aims: Build resilience, enhance coping skills, identify and manage resistance to change, and clarify values and goals for creating new.
Anxiety Disorder
Anxiety disorder refers to a group of unsettling experiences characterised by excessive worry, rumination about the past, feelings of restlessness and being on edge, loss of focus and avoiding certain places, people and activities that trigger these feelings. We feel these experiences as fatigue, irritability, butterflies in the stomach, sleep disturbances, muscle tension, and disrupted breathing patterns.
Therapy Aims: identifying and challenging distorted thinking patterns, managing and coping with triggers, building resilience, improving stress management skills
Emotion Dysregulation
Experiencing intense and overwhelming emotions that are difficult to control and regulate disrupts our daily functioning and negatively affects our relationships. This can be manifested as extreme emotional reactions such as anger, fear, sadness, and irritability. Impulsive behaviour, recklessness. Self- destructive behaviours, substance abuse, dysregulated eating, negative self-perceptions, and severe mood swings are regarded as emotion dysregulations.
Therapy Aims: Improving distress tolerance, increasing self-awareness, enhancing coping skills, and addressing underlying psychological contributing factors.
Chronic Illness Counselling
Living with chronic illness profoundly affects how we perceive ourselves, our bodies, our relationships, and the whole world. Encountering and dealing with the limitations that chronic illness imposes on us, such as constant pain, fatigue, mobility issues, and other disabilities, body image, results in feelings of sadness, profound grief, anxiety, frustration and depression.
Therapy Aims: Emotional support, building resilience, problem-solving skills, improving the quality of life by managing and improving healthy behaviours, radical acceptance and adjustment, fostering self-compassion, and developing communication skills.
Depression
Persistent feelings of sadness, lack of motivation, hopelessness, lack of interest or seeking pleasure while disrupting our daily functioning and decreasing the quality of life affect how we think, feel and behave. Depression is a multifaceted mental health issue that is the result of the interplay between genetic and biological factors such as family history and environmental and psychological factors such as traumatic life events and chronic illness.
Therapy Aims: Alleviating depressive symptoms and improving daily functioning, reframing cognitive restructuring, and behavioural improvements that promote a sense of accomplishment and decrease lethargy and apathy. Interpersonal skills, development, and problem- solving skills.
Grief and Loss
Navigating the world after losing a loved one is the main task of bereaved individuals.
Grief is a reaction to the universal phenomenon of loss, though grieving is quite an individual experience that can take various trajectories in people. While there seems no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in how people grieve, this natural, rational, and moral copying mechanism in the face of loss that disrupts a person’s psychological and social equilibrium can be recognised as a ‘disorder.’
Therapy Aims: Validation and support, Understanding the grief process, Elevating separation distress, Promoting self-regulation, Building connections, Revisiting the world and setting aspirational goals.
Relationship Issues
We are defined by our relationships to ourselves, other people and the environing world in general. Therefore, relationship issues impact all aspects of our lives. Issues can happen in any type of relationship, including romantic partnerships, familial relationships, work-related ones, friendships, etc. We experience an impaired or faulty relationship in the shape of feelings of insecurity, resentment, shame, guilt, loss of emotional intimacy, mistrust, a sense of betrayal, loneliness and disconnection.
Therapy Aims: Addressing communication problems by developing conflict resolution techniques and boundary setting, exploring attachment styles and co-dependency, enhancing cultural and interfaith competence in coping with differences, and many other goals tailored to every unique relationship.
Neuro-affirmative Psychotherapy
Neuro-affirmitivity takes neurological differences as valuable and integral to human diversity, rejecting the deficit-based model. We recognize that no two neurodivergent experiences are the same, even within the same diagnostic framework (e.g., autism or ADHD); therefore our therapeutic gear adapts to the individual’s unique needs, preferences, and lived experiences.
In other words, by deconstructing pathological tendencies, we try to shift from ‘labelling’ to ‘understanding’ how societal norms, expectations, and systems of power/suppression contribute to distress neurodiverse individuals. With such recognition, we move away from regarding neurodiversity as ‘social disability‘. Acknowledging that barriers to human flourishing often arise from inaccessible environments and societal attitudes, we take into account the neurodivergent condition as unique condition of engaging with the world.
Therapy Aims: acceptance and identity exploration, empowerment and advocacy, Reducing masking, Sensory and Emotional Regulation
Parenting Programs
Parenting is a skill, a full-time profession that needs to be rewarded as it deserves. Raising and nurturing a child encompasses many challenges that cannot be mastered intuitively. Being a parent to every child of the same family is a distinct experience, so it needs constant adjustment skills. Adequately addressing the psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual needs of our children is the ultimate goal of parenting. Such an endeavour requires guidance and support from parenting experts. IASO CARE Team is a certified Triple P parenting programs provider.
Therapy Aims: Managing tantrums, defiance, aggression, and noncompliance. Improving parent- child relationships, addressing communication issues, misunderstandings and mistrust. Adjusting parenting styles between two parents, addressing parental stress and burnout. Improving sibling relationships leads to harmony and cooperation. Navigating specific issues of parenting teens, single parenting and complexities of blended families.
Embitterment
Embitterment is a complex psychological state characterised by intense anger, resentment, and hopelessness resulting from a perceived injustice, loss, or violation of a person’s fundamental beliefs, assumptions, and psychological integrity. Experiencing discrimination and facing social and political barriers over a lifetime for CALD women results in social isolation and feelings of neglect, loneliness, frustration, anger, demoralisation and bitterness. Embitterment can represent itself with quite similar anxiety, depression and PTSD- like symptoms. Therefore, it is an experience that can easily ignored by mainstream therapists. Therapists with intercultural competence can provide culturally sensitive and relevant regards and support unique to the IASO CARE team.
Therapy Aims: Addressing the complex mood structure and cognitive framework of embitterment in order to remove the psychological and motivational block in fulfilling the basic needs of autonomy, agency, competence and belonging.
Expat Therapy
Living and working in a foreign land is a complex emotional experience: A feeling of excitement shadowed by fear of the unknown, A celebratory feeling of achievement constantly ticked by the anxiety of loneliness, humble gratefulness for the opportunity in the new land competing with a flowing sense of guilt over leaving home behind. What happens to us when our body and mind are at the crossroads of these conflicting feelings?
The overwhelming unfamiliarity of the surroundings disorients us, all new and different social norms confuse us, and communication barriers frustrate us. All these paralyses our curiosity and passion for learning the unknown; then, we feel reluctant to encounter new situations and prefer to self-isolate.
Therapy Aims: Providing support and guidance for cultural adjustment, improving the sense of belonging and identity, and sustaining pre-existing relationships in the homeland while exploring emerging ones and building resilience and cultural competence by promoting adaptation, growth and personal fulfillment.
