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Ben Bruce
Principal Psychologist & Clinic Director
Areas of Specialty
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Trauma, PTSD & CPTSD
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Complex Cases
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Grief
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Anxiety
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Depression
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Addiction
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Forensic
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Family Systems
Therapy Techniques
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Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
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Schema Therapy
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Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)
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Psychodymanic
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Hypnosis
Ben’s Approach and Philosophy
Ben Bruce specialises in helping individuals overcome painful early life experiences and long-standing emotional patterns, using an empowering, psychodynamic and integrative approach. Ben is committed to being a steady, authentic and attuned clinician, guiding clients toward healthier ways of relating to themselves, others and life’s challenges.
Professional Background
Ben has over 20 years of experience working in the field of psychology and mental health, fulfilling over 30,000 client-hours during this time. He is a board-approved Supervisor and is extremely proud of the team he has put together of specialist psychologists, allied health, reception and support staff at the BPS clinic.
Areas of Focus
Ben aims to help people who have experienced painful early life experiences. This includes situations of loss, neglect, abuse, deprivation and ongoing core feelings of hopelessness, shame, inadequacy and anger impacting their current capacity to relate to others and have meaningful relationships.
He helps people to understand and overcome self-defeating life patterns and maladaptive coping mechanisms to become more truly individuated as the best versions of themselves.
Building a Healthy Self
Ben focuses on helping the client build a healthy version of the self through changing the way that he or she relates to their experiences to deal with life challenges in more expert ways based on greater understanding and wisdom.
An example is fear, the core root of anxiety disorders: we need to come to terms with the fact that fear and dangerous potentials cannot be gotten rid of, but we can change our relationship to fear, just as we can with any human emotion, situation or predicament.
Empowerment and Psychological Growth
This focus on empowerment is the core of Ben’s approach, helping his clients to strive for healthy and well-balanced behaviour and connection, coming from the healthy adult mode of relating to experience and to others, building psychological health, flexibility, maturity and good judgement.
Therapist as a Guide
Ben focuses on being the dependable, stoic, relatable, flexible, real and attuned clinician, modelling an authenticity of self. He endeavours to be very much on your side as you embark upon your mission to become your true self and leave maladaptive machinations behind.
He will also challenge you if you engage in counterproductive efforts, so as not to enable what is unhelpful and to guide you toward the achievement of your goals. This is the Trilectic Approach that he has inaugurated (combining Hegelian Dialectics with the Transcendent Function / collective unconscious model proposed by Jung).
Therapeutic Expertise
Ben specialises in providing therapy to help with trauma/ PTSD, with a particular emphasis on complex psychosomatic conditions as well as personality disorders, grief, anxiety, depression, addictions and couples and family systems therapy.
He utilises a psychodynamic underpinning (Jungian) informed by an eclectic and practical approach, involving CBT, DBT, Systems Theory, ACT, and Schema Therapy, as well as mindfulness, EMDR, and Hypnosis, which he utilises as adjunctive tools. It all depends on the client’s presenting needs, situation, personality and background.
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