Lorena Covington

I have space during weekdays and can also offer sessions on weekends. Pease get in touch to discuss specifics. We can work online or in person.

If you are a medical professional and need to arrange sessions to fit a varying schedule, I'll be happy to work with you to do that.

I offer a free 30-minute talk online to see if I can be helpful to you, and if we both feel we could work together. Most clients meet with me for 1, 50-55minute session per week, but if you would like more intensive work, we can schedule twice-weekly sessions.

I am an integrative therapist, which means that I practice different ways of doing therapy: from the start, I focus on finding out what works best for you. I don't work from a set formula: we're unique people with particular life experiences and ways of thinking, and I think that to do good therapy we take that uniqueness into consideration and start where you are. I try to pay attention to your pace and your style, and I also pay attention to ways that the world may impinge on your freedoms: I think it's important to attend to power differences in the outside world and the way various kinds of bias--sexism, racism, homophobia, religious oppression (to name a few) affect us. I don't believe in therapists as authority figures: we share the power, and I use what I know to help empower you both inside and outside the session. 

For couples, I work from the perspective of Relational Life Therapy. I'm happy to see couples in which BOTH people are attending therapy willingly. If you want couples' therapy and your partner doesn't, individual therapy is probably the wiser choice.

Our first contact would be a 30 minute session (at no cost) to discuss what's bringing you into therapy at this point in your life, and to get a sense of whether I can be helpful to you and whether we would be comfortable working together.

Once we agree to work together, I will send you a contract that covers fees and payment method(s), cancellations and no-shows and how much notice we would give each other before holidays. It discusses confidentiality (and its limits), how we might handle crises, and contact information for us both. 

In the first full session, I will probably ask you something about how your daily life is right now and what it was like for you growing up. (Sometimes we move more slowly: it depends on what you feel like sharing. I know sometimes it takes more time to get comfortable, so if it takes more than one session to get background information, that's fine, too.) 

I'll be asking you to tell me the things you feel are most important about your life, and where you're finding (or not finding) meaning. This helps me build a picture of how we might best work together to get the results you want. I will probably take some notes in the first session, but I don't usually take notes during later sessions. Therapy is first and foremost a conversation: I'll be listening to you.

I have space open during weekdays and can also provide sessions on weekends. 

I've had great supervisors, and I know the difference great supervision can make to a therapist's wellbeing and practice. A healthy therapist can create the best environment for healthy clients! Doing therapy is hard work (I love it!), but I've also met people whose supervision experiences have burdened them, wrecked their confidence and made them unhappy. The old model of supervisor as the authority who tells you what you did "wrong", criticises you and throws their weight around needs to be updated. I believe supervision should be collegial, supportive, truthful and empathetic.  Your supervisor should be the person you feel safe with, so you can bring the things that worry you or (that made you cringe), and take them on together. It is not a place for shaming, blaming or being the "expert".  Supervision, I think, should be the space where two people discuss client work, brainstorm, strategise, and muse. 

I don't think it's possible to divide the therapist from the whole person. A therapist's history, personality and viewpoint will influence their practice as much as the client's background and ways of being. I think supervision should support as much as possible the entire person of the therapist; not just the professional. I like to think that supervisees will feel free and secure enough with me to share what's worrying them. 

My early training was in psychodynamic therapy and in client-centred therapy. Psychodynamic concepts such as transference, countertransference and parallel process are part of how I see what happens in therapy and in supervision. I also have studied Gestalt, existential and Buddhist therapy, and I'm interested in contexts of relative power in therapy. You will get supportive supervision and we will also engage in  intellectual aspects of the work.

I offer a free, 30-minute session to discuss what you're looking for in supervision and to get  a sense if we would be well suited to work together.