About / My Approach
Hi, I'm Dr Russell Downham, a clinical psychologist working with individuals and couples across Australia by video (excluding the Blue Mountains region), from a dedicated home office in NSW.
I took the long road to becoming a psychologist, first completing a PhD in Philosophy, and that background gave me two things that inform my approach to therapy now. First, years of genuinely sitting with the deeper questions that bring many of my clients to therapy: meaning, mortality, authenticity -- before I ever did this professionally. Second, a habit that Philosophy trains into you: taking an idea seriously enough to argue it as well as its strongest advocate would, then doing the same for the opposite view. I greatly enjoy helping individuals and couples to gain clarity and balance by resolving apparent contradictions to reveal deeper unifying truths.
I also draw on a long personal meditation practice, including a period of Vipassana practice. Mindfulness meditation is not the answer to every problem, but when the way forwards appears blocked, there's usually some pivotal choice hidden in our automatic thoughts and interpretations of our experience. Slowing down and becoming mindfully aware of these moments of unnoticed freedom lets us choose how we relate to whatever is actually happening within us, and between ourselves and others.
There's plenty of general information out there, but the real trick is finding what works for you. Guided by my professional training and experience, I seek to help you work through what you're really struggling with in the here and now, rather than just explaining strategies in a general way and then expecting you to apply these out of session without practicing them in session first. A lot of thoughts have power only because we take them more seriously than they deserve, so I use compassion and humour to create psychological distance from unhelpful inner narratives (doing what Acceptance and Commitment Therapy calls 'cognitive defusion').
I trained to Level 3 in the Gottman Method for couples work, but I'm not a Gottman purist. My overall approach is integrative and collaborative: bringing different approaches together in the context of a natural conversation, focusing on your agenda and responding dynamically to what comes up between you rather than following a manualised to what's in front of me rather than a manual.
Those of us inclined to think deeply about things can all too easily find ourselves unhelpfully absorbed in the mirror of our own reflections, and so suffering more than necessary. My mission is to help the thoughts that point your attention where its needed become more interesting and influential.