Our vision is to offer quality, effective and integrated psychotherapies influenced by both traditional and contemporary thinkers to individuals, and couples, in Melbourne. Contemporary therapists know that making sense of our life history changes our relationships with others and ourselves. Research has also shown that the best indicator of a child's emotional health is in how their parent made sense of their story.

It's been a life mission to create a like-minded therapeutic space for psychotherapists and a safe therapeutic environment for people interested in exploring what motivates them and the role the body can play in healing and transformation. Another intention has been to integrate ancient yoga wisdom into the work. Along side this is a dream to collaborate with yoga communities in processing the core emotional and characterological patterns we meet on the spiritual path. A deeply held vision for less suffering, and greater unity, is at the work's core.

"... we come to resonate with one another. The whole we create together is truly larger than our individual identities. We feel this resonance as a palpable sense of connection and aliveness. This is what happens when our minds meet..."
Dr Daniel J Siegel, MD

My first formal psychological study was in the field of trauma whilst writing a master's thesis in 2004. I was naturally curious about what happens to the psyche when negative experiences repeatedly occur outside ones control. When a human being is totally helpless. I found, consistent with research at the time, that childhood trauma negatively impacts how we view others and ourselves later in life. The journey then took me to working with families suffering, deep, multigenerational trauma. Change happened in very small windows.

Over the past decade, or so, I have trained in Psychodynamic Therapy, Infant and Child Development, Buddhism and Psychotherapy, Jungian Mind, Body and Soul, and more recently, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy – bringing into focus maps for trauma informed therapy and working with the way childhood injuries, at different stages of our development, live in our body and shape core beliefs about our self and the world.  I'm also currently completing post-graduate Yoga Teacher Training studies at  Agama Yoga Centre. Having been drawn to Yoga and other Eastern Contemplative Traditions most of my adult life, I'm really excited to begin teaching - and integrate this ancient wisdom more deeply into the therapeutic space.

As the path has unfolded, helping people recover a sense of wholeness in mind and body has become my life's work. Our symptoms often reflect the unconscious strategies we adopt to cope/survive experiences like: child abuse and neglect, growing up in families affected by alcoholism or violence, being bullied at school or work, the affects of active addition, the sudden death of a close friend or relative, change because our partner leaves us, or our work has lost direction or we're transitioning to a new stage of life.

Many clients walk into my rooms literally burnt out in mind and body from decades of living in overwhelm. The other extreme might be feeling a chronic sense of flatness and/or disconnection. Or we may oscillate between the two. We start learning how to stabilise our nervous system. We then begin the journey of processing the psychological wounds that keep us stuck. Sometimes, this may lead to recovering that sense of grace and ease that's inherent to all our nature. 

Experience in the Now is being absolutely in my body in primal sensation in conscious awareness listening from the inside. This is my work – this is my living.

My work as a psychotherapist is constantly evolving. The original ground was the psychodynamic tradition and it’s interest in the unconscious.

More recently, I’ve added the body and breath into the therapeutic picture. This certainly feels more complete. Because every client's adaptation to their life experience is unique to them I like to, together, create a therapeutic map that fits with already known strengths and other parts that might be available for change. I draw from a range of therapeutic models and techniques – somatic psychology, structural dissociation, sensorimotor psychotherapy, trauma-sensitive yoga, internal family systems, attachment theory and Havening Techniques.

Over time, we come to honour Hakomi therapist Ron Kurtz’s principles of organicity (the inborn intelligence and wisdom of the body that helps us grow, heal and change), non-violence (change without force), mind-body holism and unity (the interconnection of all beings) in the therapeutic relationship and our lives more broadly.

"My first impulse is to find something to love, something heroic, something recognisable as the gift and the burden of the human condition, the pain and the grace that's there to find in everyone you meet"
Ron Kurtz

A MODEL OF TRAUMA

When faced with perceived or imagined danger the brain automatically turns on an adrenaline stress system  – our thinking brain shuts down and we go into survival mode. Sometimes we can put this experience behind us. Other times, if the experiences have been repetitive, we can be left with intense symptoms that tell our story without words and without the understanding that we are remembering events and feelings from long ago. The activation of survival response can also become a habit, for example withdrawing or hiding may have originally been adaptive but later in life it may contribute to excessive isolation and sadness.

The Structural Dissociation Model (Van der Hart, 2006) helps us identify and work with different parts of the psyche that had a particular job to do in order to survive. Honoring the different, and sometimes conflicted, parts in a nonjudgmental way can help integration and healing. 

SENSORIMOTOR PSYCHOTHERAPY

Developed by Pat Odgen PhD, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy offers the possibility to mindfully study, together, the way our bodies organise experience around health and wellness, our emotional/attachment wounds and symptoms of traumatisation. We begin, with mindful awareness, to notice and report our immediate bodily experience in relation to a theme or memory. When activation becomes too strong we’ll typically practice body, breath exercises to restore felt sense of calm in the body. In states of numbness or disconnection, we'll typically use the body to engage the sympathetic nervous system (e.g., stand up and move around).

For further information www.sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org

BODY, BREATH PRACTICE

Yoga traditions have known for more than 2500 years that awareness of breath and body sensation helps calm our nervous system and bring us back into our bodies. There are particular somatic exercises, we can practice together, that help our bodies remember it's natural state of ease and wellness.  Containment exercises work well when we’ve lost connection with our core and feel overwhelmed. That sense inside if our cup is too full or spilling over. Feeling into our feet and the earth can help when we lose our connection to the ground. Feeling into, and lengthening, our spine can help to feel more solid and real. Bit by bit, we come to inhabit our body, and lives, more fully. 

HAVENING TECHNIQUES

Havening Techniques are exposure-based psychosensory methods that disrupt the pathway between a particular memory and the overwhelming, emotional, cognitive and somatosensory responses we habitually continue to experience.  Havening Techniques typically treat traumatically encoded memories.  Through sensory input (touch that produces delta waves) and distraction, it becomes possible to delink habitual emotions (e.g., terror) from a specific emotional/distressing memory  (e.g., being at a childhood piano recital).

For further information www.havening.org

"No ray of sunlight is ever lost, but the green which it wakes into existence needs time to sprout, and it is not always granted the power to live to see the harvest. All work that is worth anything is done in faith"
Albert Schweitzer

Caroline Browne MAPS

South Melbourne Psychology
140 Albert Road
South Melbourne
Victoria 3205

Telephone 03 9804 5000
 

BRAND MARK

(Designed by RoscherCreative)

The well-known Rorschach Inkblot Test inspired the Caroline Browne brand mark. The pattern the inkbot makes is mandala like in shape, which taps into Caroline's use of Eastern philosophies and methods in her approach to therapy. The inkblot is the coming together of two faces, two profiles. This speaks both of the collaboration of client and therapist and also the layered nature of the human psyche. The colours, from the magenta bottom to red heart centre, stretch up to the enlightened gold. The shape is uplifting and suggests progress and evolution.

It is an inkblot test.

So what do you see?