Christina Manfredi
Principle Owner & Director
Psychotherapist Perth – Gestalt & Existential Therapist – Psychological Counsellor – Transpersonal / Spiritual Therapist & Trauma Therapist
What I Offer
I have a passion and commitment in assisting people to know who they are from the inside. To trusting the organicity of their embodied consciousness, their creative intelligence and inner authority to manifest more of what they desire with love for themselves and respect for others. This is what inspires me in working along side people.
– Christina Manfredi
Welcome to my professional biography page.
The synthesis of working within embodied Existential, Transpersonal, and Gestalt Therapy approaches, is the foundation of my therapeutic practice. I consider as Carl Jung stated that ‘the privilege of a lifetime is to become who we truly are’.
What I offer you
I offer a safe and confidential environment that brings a personalised, integrative and holistic therapeutic approach to your specific needs and desire for change. I believe also as Carl Jung stated that we are not what has happened to us, we are what we choose and intend to become within our unique environmental contexts.
The psychotherapy and psychological counselling that I offer is highly relational and facilitates a space where you can enter into a deeper relationship with your own truth and inner wisdom, the focus being a reclaiming of your own life from the dungeons of the past, and foster self healing capacity for a more choiceful, meaningful, and purposeful life. The counselling or therapy itself is an opportunity to drop into your interior life and to taste the truth of your living experience – your joys, suffering, and desire, what and who matters to you, your personal authority, and inner consent. It is a process of an inner listening to identifying that which is nourishing or harmful for you and taking responsibility for how you wish to live your life, what you choose to do about this. In this regard all aspects of your unique self and experience are respected, Spiritual, Soul, Psychological, Emotional, Physical, Sexual, Relational, and Environmental. The work that I offer is very much with a focus on embodied experience. What this means is that we pay attention to how experience shows up in your body as sensations and feelings, with associated cognitions, impulses, images, and spiritual/energetic awareness.
One of the guiding principals of my therapeutic approach is the encouragement towards self -responsibility and aware choiceful living. I consider that we all have free will within unique contexts and are self-determining in how to respond to any situation before us. We can choose our attitude towards the life presented before us, even in the most tremendously difficult of circumstances. We create the meaning of our lives and our destiny via the choices we make and the actions or inaction that we take. It is ultimately the meanings we ascribe to our existence, our values, and our conscience that drive our direction and purpose in life.
Undeniably and inevitably pain, suffering, anxiety, and uncertainty are at times unavoidable. Life can be hard when faced with difficult situations within ourselves, or in our relationships and within our changing world. It may seem that we have little choice or capacity to change our situation or what may feel like our ‘fate’. It can feel like life can break us, and sometimes it does. We often end up putting all our hopes into a box and hiding them in the attic forgetting they are there. During these times we can often resort to old automatic ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that no longer serve us, or the present situation at hand. We may enter into our primal survival responses just to keep our world in-tack. Simultaneously we may feel that we do not have the skills or resources to respond any differently. This in itself may lead to feelings of desperation, intolerable anxiety, depression, despair, helplessness, and possibly even suicidal thoughts. These are tough times, the times of what existentialist refer to as a psychic vacuum, a complete loss of meaning, truly the dark night of the soul, and what the Buddhist refer to as ‘realms of the hungry ghosts’,
It is during these times we may all need help and support from an another in private confidence. The therapy that I offers respects that self-healing is actually an ‘inside’ choiceful subjective resourcing experience. Our body-mind awareness holds an intelligence and magnificent orientation towards health and healing and what it may be that we may need to face and accept to bring integration or resolution to the situation at hand. We just need to be supported to re-member or provided an opportunity to listen inward to what and who really matters to us, to have the courage to become aware of how we are facing a situation and or contributing to it. As we grow our awareness and allow and trust the instinctual intuitive direction and ultimate source of that inner intelligence and healing, what it is that we must act towards or not, becomes clear.
My role when working with you is as a clinically trained attuned therapist that can provide witness to your unique experience and to assist you with accessing your innate, and environmental healing resources and possibilities. Change is possible as you can bear it and take response-ability for it. I can provide support, specific skill building if needed, and guidance along your journey of freedom to be you, your self-acceptance, your personal authority, and the fuller expression of your unique meaning, direction, purpose and true self.
What I offer you is an opportunity to compassionately and respectfully work together to explore what troubles you and what you truly desire, to deepen your understanding, awareness and insight of what it is that must firstly be released, or strengthen and grown, and finally integrated so that a liberated life can be embraced. In order for the new to be fully born a space of understanding and acceptance of what has been and what is must be made before the life you desire can be actively intentioned, resourced and manifested. As needed I can assist you in developing further skills and personal resources in accordance with your values, ethics, and integrity to intentionally seed and bring about the change that will serve your health & wellbeing, your unique vision, goals and purpose.
You are the responsive transformative force, the core active participant in your own wellbeing. Ultimately your healing rests within your own choices and self response-ability.
– Christina Manfredi
And the day came when the risk that it took to bud
Was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
– Anais Nin
Contact Details
Existential, Transpersonal, and Gestalt Therapy Centre
Tel: 0422 648 243 (please text)
Email: christina.manfredi@iinet.net.au