
Ricardo Dans
Psychotherapist – Lavendla TherapyI offer Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) to individuals looking for help with:
- Balancing emotions and improving coping skills
- Navigating bonds leading to healthy relationships
- Exploring self and expressing your true wonderful self.
I am a compassionate, highly skilled and creative psychotherapist with vast life experience from a multicultural background. This all led me to develop quite an open mind with 3 core values:
Freedom - to unapologetically be one's true self for it is unique and most precious
Curiosity - to explore what is inside and outside of the comfort zone.
Courage - to feel and to express difficult, complicated and conflicting feelings.
What can I help you with?
- Handling difficult emotions and coping strategies for anger, anxiety, avoidance, fear, depression, suicidal thoughts, self-harm, hopelessness, feeling disconnected from self, feeling numb, lack of joy, isolation and withdrawing.
- Self-exploration and expression, identity crisis, finding out who you are, what makes you tick, who and what sparks a light in you, self-esteem.
- Issues in your relationships, endings, loss, heartbreak, intimacy, vulnerability, sex, different roles, rejection, interpersonal communication, boundaries, needs, desires, and conflicts.
How can I help you?
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Sessions: A 60 min therapy session exploring the why's in your life and how you find meaning or make sense of it. Here we will look at how the past informs the present through unconscious processes and behaviours stemming from childhood experiences, expectations and attachment styles. See life from a whole new angle.
Dialectic Behaviour Therapy (DBT) Sessions: A 60 min therapy session where you'll learn skills to manage unhelpful, self-harming and/or suicidal behaviours coming from emotional dysregulation. You'll learn about crisis survival skills and reality acceptance skills to enhance resilience, interpersonal skills and apply effective mindfulness skills to improve self-awareness and to see life as it presents itself right now.
Psychotherapy and DBT Blend: These more intense 90 min interventions look at how the past informs the present. How to deal with the new insight obtained and everyday life in a skillful way where both our emotional and conflicting or opposing rational drives can co-exist without making things worse for you. With weekly homework or tasks, you'll establish healthier or less harmful coping habits, a challenging and rewarding invesment of your time, energy and efforts.
My work experience
I have extensive experience in:
- Working with clients online on bereavement, life changes, break-ups, loss of self, emotional dysregulation, sexuality and gender identity.
- As well as face-to-face from my clinical work at the Priory (private psychiatric hospital) with both inpatients and outpatients dealing with suicidal thoughts and behaviours from depression, issues related to living with autism, ADHD, and other neurodivergence and low self-esteem
- Before becoming a psychotherapist, I trained as a medical microbiologist specialised in Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) and HIV and worked for many years with different communities (LGBTQ+ and ethnic minorities) in New York, Manchester and London.
What drove me to become a psychotherapist?
My biggest drive to become a psychotherapist was both my desire to help others get through life's struggles and my own need to find myself. Having personally experienced and provided psychotherapy, I know what a difference this can make. I feel humbled and privileged being able to provide this to you.
Interested in starting therapy?
To discuss what you're struggling with and to look at how we can work together to help you feel better and create a life worth living for yourself, simply book an initial 45 min assessment.
How long are the therapy sessions?
45 min sessions: These sessions are for assessments only
60 min sessions: These sessions are your regular psychotherapy or DBT sessions
90 min sessions: These sessions are for psyfortherapy and DBT blends only