TIRP Low Cost Therapy

What is TIRP Low Cost Therapy?

TIRP stands for the Toronto Institute of Relationship Psychotherapy (www.tirp.ca), and is the school where I did my training for providing psychotherapy.

As a senior student therapist, I have completed the TIRP 3 phases of training, have completed 50 hours of clinical supervision and 150 hours of direct client contact, as well as 120 hours of personal psychotherapy. This aspect of my training is important in that it helps me to identify my own relational patterns, and helps me to understand what being a client is like.

As a TIRP student therapist, I subscribe to a professional code of ethics, carry professional liability insurance and belong to a professional association. I am working toward membership in the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario.

As a model of psychotherapy, relational psychotherapy has proven to be effective and powerful for people who experience chronic distress, whether in the emotional, psychological or relational realm. It’s based on these principles:

• Emotional well-being depends on having satisfying mutual relationships with others.
• Emotional distress is often rooted in patterns of relational experience, past and present, which have the power to demean and deaden the self.
• The relational therapist tries to understand the client’s unique self-experience in its social/relational context and to respond with empathy and genuine presence.
• Together, client and therapist create a new in-depth relationship which is supportive, strengthening, and enlivening for the client.
• Within this secure relationship, the client can safely re-experience, and then find freedom from, the powerful effects of destructive relationships, past and present.
• In relational psychotherapy, a client’s sense of self is strengthened and transformed. Their confidence grows and their sense of well-being in the world can be vastly improved. To be empowered and experience personal growth through interpersonal connection is the goal of relational psychotherapy.

In therapy, clients will be asked to consider things like: “What thought and feelings patterns do I have?” “What do I understand about the power of past and present relationships to shape my self-experience?”

There is significant interpersonal impact from power differentials and social issues like race, class, culture, gender and sexual differences. Relational therapists understand this reality, and work with clients on these issues and their impact on a person’s self-experience.

All therapy sessions are conducted according to TIRP’s standards of professional ethics, including confidentiality and appropriate supervision.