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!
Jan 2025: The Brain, the Nervous System & Change - part 1.
Change is sometimes easy to make - If we get tired of watching the ITV news, we can give the BBC a go. But most change that we seek to address (often through therapy) has varying degrees of difficulty, as you probably know. There are many complex reasons for this, and many different theories (hundreds in fact) that the psychological professions have come up with to try to understand why and what can help overcome the difficulty. All these theories hold some value and some truth, but just like with the laws of physics and ideas in economics, none of them are complete.
You have possibly come across the idea that the human brain is the most complex structure that we know of in the universe. In recent years neuroscientists have understood more to confirm this reality. We now know, that we are born with around 86 billion neurons in our brain, which then connect with each other on multiple levels as we experience life and develop an understanding for how the world works. These connections form a neural network, with more synaptic connections between the neurons than there are stars in the universe. And there are more start in the universe than there are grains of sand on planet earth! And all this by the age of 5.
So, when people come seeking counselling and psychotherapy at our Oxford & Witney centres, sometimes they don't always appreciate why change can be so difficult. But, when we think about the complexity of the brain which I have just outlined, which forms alongside our nervous system during the first years of life, you begin to appreciate why neuroscientist are now confirming what Freud was theorising about 120 years ago, that we are predominantly 'unconscious'.
More on this next month...
Feb 2025: The Brain, the Nervous System & Change - part 2.
Last month, we referenced the neuroscience which now appreciates that the vast majority of the structure of your brain and nervous system as you read this text formed by the age of 5. But if we asked you to write a book about all you could remember of those first 5-years, how big a book could you write? Most people, when we ask them this question would answer with, a page or two at most; with some people saying they have no memory of this brain and nervous system forming time at all.
There is a concept called ‘Neuroplasticity’, which refers to the ability of the brain to change through further experiences beyond the age of 5, and throughout life. We know that with new information for example, our opinions can change. Some opinions are however, more resilient than others. A good example would be with voting in general elections. ‘Floating Voters’ are known as such because their vote changes from one election to another. For others, they would never vote anything other than conservative, or labour for example. Why is there this difference between floating and committed voters?
For the purpose of this blog, let us imagine that a client came to therapy because they were a fixed voter, and wanted to become a floating voter (or vice versa), and they wanted us to help them with this ‘problem’. At this point, we don’t need to develop an understanding of why someone would have a problem like this - after all, it is often the case that we don’t understand the problems other people have at all. We are really just fleshing out some of the landscape as to why change might be difficult, and how we might begin to think about it with this voting client. So, between now and next month’s blog, you might consider reasons why some people are floating voters and some are not, and what the implications are for the therapist they want help from.
March 2025: Change and the ‘floating voter’.
Last month I invited you to think about change with regard to a voter. The first invitation for your thinking was regarding why some people are floating voters and some are not. It doesn’t seem too big a stretch to think about it being influence from their family of origin and upbringing. Sometimes people will develop very strong fixed views about their own politics which is in keeping with their families, and sometime it is in opposition to them. There are many, many subtle and unconscious factors at play which have an affect on whether you adopt your families ‘culture’, or grow to oppose it. So the idea that because some people adopt and some people oppose any particular given aspect of family means that is random is wrong, but hard to prove, because there are so many factors at play. You could google ‘attachment theory’ on the internet, and you would find that some people develop as securely attached and some as insecurely attached. When you understand the details around how these attachment styles (and there are others) develop, you would understand that this isn’t random either.
Next month, I will talk more about these complex variables, but before then, I wanted to say something about the second query I left you with.. what are the implications for the therapist the voter wants help from to change their voting tendencies (floating or fixed)? There are two major implications. Firstly, it feels impossible doesn’t it - to get someone to be a lifetime conservative voter from now on if they have always been floating voter? Or to get a staunch Labour voter to contemplate floating over to the ‘right’. How would you do it? When we appreciate that our personalities, character traits and values are essentially hard wired in, you begin to see the challenge.
Although we are looking at a request for help that I can’t imagine ever being asked for, the principles around the difficulty are never these real, and widely applicable. The next implication for the therapist is a dilemma. Clearly, a part of this client is attached to one position (be it floating or fixed) and another part of this client wants to change it. The words we use to communicate just don’t do justice to the complexity of human nature - who is the client? Is it the one who ‘speaks’ say they want to change their voting habits, or the one that ‘acts’ to keep them the same? Which one of them should the therapist support? As this blog continues, we will uncover more about the complexity of ‘us’, and the implied complications for therapy! Until next time…
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