Ontic Psychology offers open-ended trauma therapy with no time limits and is led by Dr Candice O'Neil, a Counselling Psychologist with a Doctorate in Psychology and over a decade of clinical experience across the NHS and private practice.

The expectation that six to eight sessions should be enough to recover from trauma or from any other complex, long-standing difficulty is one of the most damaging assumptions in our industry. Healing is non-linear. It cannot be rushed or measured against a timeline. 

At Ontic Psychology, we have built our entire practice around delivering the depth of support needed for recovery. Support here is available for as long as you need it. A six-week review is built into every client's journey to ensure the therapy is genuinely meeting your needs, you’re enjoying your therapy sessions and that you remain in co-creation of your own journey. 

98% of our clients choose to continue beyond 20 sessions because they’re enjoying their time with us and are making meaningful progress in finding clarity, overcoming challenges and deepening their understanding of themselves. 

Sessions are available weekly or fortnightly. Therapy with Ontic Psychology is available in person in our therapy clinics in Loughborough or Chelsea, London, online or by telephone.

At Ontic Psychology, we do not ask clients to retell their trauma and there is a clear clinical reason for this.

Asking a trauma survivor to provide a detailed account of their traumatic experience carries a genuine risk of retraumatisation and recreating the conditions of the original harm within what should be a safe therapeutic space. This is well evidenced in the clinical literature on trauma and it is one of the most important things we are committed to protecting you from.

The way we work is not about what happened. It is about how what happened lives in you now: in your body, your relationships, your sense of self, and your capacity for trust and connection. We work with those feelings and experiences in the present, making sense of them, processing them, and gradually integrating them into your story as something that happened to you rather than something that defines or controls you.

NHS therapy is typically capped at 6-8 sessions and may not provide enough time or depth to explore more complex needs, especially for trauma integration and healing. Therapy with Ontic Psychology is open ended, collaborative and puts the client at the heart of their therapy.

For complex or long-standing difficulties and particularly for trauma, open-ended therapy is more likely to result in a deeper and lasting outcome versus time-limited models. The reason for this is not simply that more sessions equals more progress. It is because therapeutic work requires something that a fixed number of therapy sessions may not be able to provide safety in enough depth to fully support recovery. 

Safety in therapy is built over time through the quality of the relationship between therapist and client. For many trauma survivors, particularly those whose early experiences involved a fundamental breach of trust, the process of building safety is itself part of the healing. 

Open-ended therapy also allows for the natural non-linearity of healing.

For many people, particularly those carrying trauma, complex PTSD, or the long-term impact of difficult childhood experiences, six to eight therapy sessions is simply not enough time to do more than scratch the surface.

When a system imposes a session limit, it creates an unspoken pressure on both client and therapist. Clients can feel they need to produce progress and therapists can feel they need to deliver results for the client. And the thing that gets sacrificed in that pressure is the very thing therapy depends on most — the gradual, patient building of genuine trust and safety.

What we see frequently in the clients who arrive at Ontic Psychology after a previous time-limited experience is not that therapy didn't help at all but that it often stopped at precisely the moment when they were beginning to feel ready for the real work to start. The experience of being discharged mid-journey can make the next attempt at therapy harder because it reinforces a fear that healing isn't really possible.

Progress in therapy, particularly trauma therapy, rarely looks the way people expect it to. It is rarely dramatic and almost never moves in a straight line.

What you will begin to notice over time is pausing before reacting in a way you used to react automatically. You might notice that you can sit with a difficult feeling rather than immediately needing to escape it. You might catch yourself thinking about an old pattern and realising, with genuine surprise, that you no longer feel compelled to repeat it.

One of the most telling signs that we hear in some form from almost every client at a certain point in their therapy is a quiet realisation: "I notice I used to do this. And I don't have to do this anymore." That moment is agency returning or emerging for the first time and is one of the most significant things we witness in our practice. 

There will also be sessions that feel frustrating or even harder than when you started therapy. This is not regression and is often the sign that something important is being approached and that feelings which have been buried are beginning to surface in a space that is finally safe enough to hold them. Learning to recognise that distinction is something we navigate together.

A six-week review is built into every client journey at Ontic Psychology. Every six weeks we ask honest questions together about how the therapy is meeting your needs, what has shifted and what you want for the next stage. This keeps you in conscious control of your own process rather than simply hoping progress is happening.

For specific presentations that are not rooted in complex or long-standing trauma, CBT can be genuinely helpful. CBT can work well for some presentations, however the common limitation of CBT for trauma survivors is that it was not designed to do what deep trauma work requires.

CBT works at the level of thoughts and behaviours to identify unhelpful thinking patterns and develop strategies to respond to them differently. For a trauma survivor, the most significant difficulties are more likely to present in how a person understands themselves and navigates the world rather than thought patterns alone and require a different kind of work.

The other significant limitation is time. CBT is typically delivered in a fixed and relatively short course of sessions. For trauma that has been shaping a person's life for years and sometimes decades, this can result in symptom management but not process healing and integration.

This is precisely what most people who come to Ontic Psychology describe: the experience of having tried CBT and other therapies, finding some temporary relief and discovering that the same patterns kept returning because the root was never reached. If that has been your experience, it does not mean therapy cannot work for you. It means you may not yet have found the approach that can go deep enough.

Motivational interviewing is a counseling approach designed to help you to unlock the motivation to make positive behavior changes and encourage growth. It’s a client-led, collaborative approach that is based on the concept that motivation for change comes from within and ‘draws out’ a client’s true motivation to change their behaviour to empower them to do so.

Dr Candice is trained to deliver Motivational Interviewing therapy for Ontic Psychology clients.