Lukas Wooller

A conversation with Lukas Wooller

• What led you to choose psychotherapy or counselling as a profession?

  In my previous life as a musician, aspects I loved were collaborating and creating with other people to create something that individually we wouldn't have arrived at on our own. I find a similar process happens in therapy, working with clients to explore their experience and find a new and fresh approach that they or I wouldn't have come up with in isolation. This can be both fun and daunting. But finding new ways of living and approaching difficult experiences is much safer and easier with another person and perspective to lean on.

• Which philosophical approaches have influenced your professional development?

  Viktor Frankl's beliefs resonate with me: that we make our own meaning in this world and that part of the human experience so to find meaning. Exploring and finding our meaning is about understanding who we truly are inside and what path through life fits us best. This is the foundation of all the work that I do with clients, although it may not be something we actually discuss explicitly.
  More practically, I am influenced by the work of master therapist Irvin Yalom, who once said that non-judgemental acceptance may be the main driver of therapeutic help. I aim to create a safe, non-judgemental atmosphere of acceptance with all my clients so they can feel comfortable exploring all the sides and parts of themselves, no matter how contradictory, painful or dark they may seem.

• What methods do you use?

  Primarily I am a person-centred therapist. I focus more on being than doing! What I mean by that is that by closely listening and attending to a client, I can truly be with what they are experiencing, maybe in a way that they haven't felt with another previously. When clients feel truly heard and seen, they start to feel safe to understand what they truly need.
  
  As I listen, I keep emotions as the focus. Modern emotion theory says that emotions are how we make sense of the world and so to understand ourselves and our world we need to be able to feel our emotions. Emotions tell us what we need, and so it follows we won't get our needs met if we don't allow ourselves to fully experience our emotions. This is rarely straight forward, but as I sit with clients I can support them to allow and safely hold important, and often perviously denied emotions. When clients complain of feeling stuck somehow, it is often because some kind of feeling they have towards a situation is not being fully allowed. Once a client feels comfortable enough, then new feelings can begin to emerge which can point a new and fresh way forward.

• When do you think the client will start to feel that progress is being made?

  My focus is on the client's experience and a key part of the way I work is to regularly check in with my client in every session to ask how they are tracking and to ascertain what, and also what is not, working for them. I can make no guarantee about when a client might feel progress will be made but if we stay in close relational contact then together we can begin to understand what will work best for each client.

• How has therapy made a difference in your life?

  Therapy has been enormously useful in helping me understand some of my behaviours which were destructive or hurtful to myself or others. By giving me a space to explore these parts of myself I was able to understand and make more mindful choices rather than being subjected to impulses or reactions which were not serving me.

• What do you like most about being a therapist?

  Put simply, to make a positive difference in people's lives.

• Do you ever have 'bad hair' days?

  Yes, but I've learned to accept those times when things aren't going as I perhaps hoped. It is a common human experience to feel disappointed or frustrated by what life can throw at us. For me, these are the times when self-compassion is so important. I believe self-compassion is an ongoing practise and is something that all humans can do for themselves when the going gets tough. So I both practise it in my own life and help my clients to practise self-compassion, so they can begin to treat themselves more kindly when they have a 'bad hair' day.

• Can you share the name of a book, film, song, event or work of art that inspires you?

  What comes to my mind is a movie called Mindhorn. I don't find it inspiring but I do find it hilarious, and I'm like everybody else - I just need a good belly laugh from time to time.