About OTS-Oxford Oxford Therapy Centre
'we have the widest range of therapy options and can find the right counsellor or psychotherapist for you, your relationship or your family’
The OTS-Oxford Therapy Centre opened in 2018 to provide a thriving counselling and therapy community for Oxford, Witney and the surrounding areas. The centre has 2 group rooms and 3 individual therapy rooms, all providing a comfortable and relaxing environment for individual, group or family therapy. If you are looking for counselling or psychotherapy in Oxford, we offer assessments in Oxford and Witney, and can refer you to one of our practitioners who work at different venues across the region. We also have low-cost practitioners on placement with us, who work at our two centres and in Jericho at the Community Centre, and in Botley at The Oxford Community Health Hub.
As well as our new centre in Oxford our other therapy centre is in central Witney, just around the corner from the main bus stops at the top of the High Street. We are well placed for people travelling from Abingdon, Burford, Bampton, Carterton, Eynsham, Faringdon, Oxford, Wantage and other surrounding towns and villages.
If you are a practitioner and are interested in therapy room hire at our centres in Oxford or Witney, please see details on ‘Room Hire’ tab. If you would like to join our growing network and community of excellence see details via the 'Joining OTS' tab.
The PsychoEducation Blog
Welcome to our blog - To help develop our understanding of human nature and the challenge of changing how life is. We will add new thinking to this blog at the beginning of each month so you can check back for the next instalment!
There is a journey unfolding with our blog posts, so, you can start from the beginning here. We post the most recent month's blog below...
June 2025:Further Down The Rabbit Hole…
In the film, The Matrix, Morpheus famously says to Neo (the Keanu Reeves character),
"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
Long term and deeper therapy processes can be like this, when we really enter into a curiosity about the uniqueness of our own human condition and psyche.
One of the trickiest aspects of having a mind, is that it likes to be right and it often likes to be certain. Some folk are (I would say) lucky enough to have developed in such a way as to be ok with uncertainty, but many of us can feel anxious without it; it all depends on the influences on us in our early development.
The problem with this need to be right and certain, is manyfold, but let us just look at two aspects for now…
Firstly, we generally identify ourselves as our minds. When we refer to our bodies, perhaps holding up a hand, we would say, ‘this is my hand’, not, ‘this is me’. We talk about my stomach, as though it is something that belongs to us, but not us. Well, ironically we also say ‘my mind’ as in, ‘I have made my mind up’. So, we talk as though we are not mind, even though we generally think it defines us. But who are we if not mind and not hand, and not stomache. This is clearly a difficult philosophical question, as well as a difficult psychological one. I am not trying to give you or lead you to definitive answers, but to invite you to think about the complexity of you (and me). Because, when we develop our capacity to be curious in ourselves, in others and the relationship between us, we might learn something new. The more attached we are to our own dogmatic beliefs and truths, then we can learn very little.
It is hard to be this curious however, when we have strong reactions to each other - like in marriages (generally after some period of time), or in therapeutic relationships, again, generally after some period of time. But why does it take time before relationships really start to break down?
To answer this to some extent, let’s look at the second aspect of mind, which needs us to revisit some of the points made in previous months’ posts, that it seems more valid to contemplate ourselves: a) as having a multiplicity of parts/minds/self-states; and b) that we are predominantly unconscious of what is going on in ‘our minds’. When we are in conflict in ourselves, say for example between a desire to be fit and join the gym, or a desire to watch the latest episodes of our favourite programmes and ‘veg out’, then we have two different self-states battling for dominance; as opposed to when we are in conflict with another person, when we might be in one dominant mind or self-state, and the conflict is with someone else.
Given that the mind wants to be certain and be right, we often battle for dominance between one internal mind or state and another, or between the minds of two different people. And it is often a battle! Learning to be curious, and not so attached to being right and certain brings possibilities other than winning or losing the battle.
Learning to be curious rather than dogmatic is a skill we can learn and practice. Not doing so, relates to the question I posed earlier - regarding. ‘why does it take time before relationships really start to break down? The simple answer is, that we didn’t get enough practice in, in being curious, before it was too late, and the full blown war with years worth of ammunition (unresolved mini-conflicts) erupted! The less flippant answer, we will return to, next month!
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