Joel Levy

I offer regular daytime/early evening sessions in south west London.

I am an experienced and accredited psychodynamic psychotherapist, working in private practice and in the NHS.

I came to psychotherapy after a long career in communications and research, including ethnographic work exploring how people from different backgrounds experience and make sense of their lives and the world around them.

People come to therapy for many different reasons. Sometimes there is a particular difficulty or crisis that has become hard to manage. Sometimes it is a more persistent feeling that something isn't right – perhaps in your relationships, how you feel about yourself, or in patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that you find yourself repeating despite wanting to change.

Whatever brings you, I offer a confidential and thoughtful space where we can talk openly about what is troubling you and try to make sense of it together.

I recognise that coming to therapy, particularly for the first time, can feel daunting. You may be uncertain about what to expect, what you want to say, or even whether therapy is right for you. I don't assume that either of us will know all the answers at the outset. Part of our work will be to discover together what may be going on beneath the surface of your difficulties.

My approach is psychodynamic, which means that I am interested not only in what is happening in your life now, but also in how earlier experiences may continue to influence your feelings, relationships and the choices you make.

As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips put it: 

          "The past influences everything and dictates nothing."

I believe that captures something important about therapy. We cannot change what has happened to us, but by understanding ourselves more deeply, we can become less constrained by it and more able to live differently and more freely now.

I work with adults from a wide range of backgrounds and with many different emotional and relationship difficulties. These include anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, grief and loss, obsessive thoughts and behaviours, feelings of emptiness or loneliness, difficulties with anger, and problems in personal or working relationships.

My approach is to listen carefully, with an open mind and curiosity about your experience. Rather than offering ready-made answers or advice, I hope we can think together about your feelings and ways of being, and the patterns that may be making life difficult for you.

Therapy can bring relief and greater clarity. It can also be  challenging, particularly when we begin to encounter feelings or aspects of ourselves that have been difficult to acknowledge. We would approach these at a pace that allows us to think about them together.

I offer regular 50-minute sessions, usually on an open-ended basis, between one and three times a week.

My fee is £80 per session.

If you are thinking about therapy, you are welcome to get in touch by email, text or phone message.

We would begin with a brief conversation about what has brought you to consider therapy now and whether I might be able to offer what you are looking for.

If we then decide to meet, our first consultation would be an opportunity for you to tell me more about yourself, your circumstances and what is troubling you. It would also give you a chance to get a sense of me and how I work.

I see this as a process of mutual exploration. Just as I would be thinking about whether I can help you, you would be considering whether I am someone you might feel able to talk to and work with.  Sometimes it can take more than one meeting for us to decide whether working together feels right.