Olakunle (Ola) Ajayi

Together, we find meaning and healing for you as we explore your experiences safely and empathically. As part of this journey, you get to know yourself better, develop emotional understanding and resilience, and experience enduring change and wholeness.

Areas of Special Interest

• Empathy
• Insight
• Psychic conflicts
• Personal growth
• Anxiety
• Paranoia
• Depression
• Shame
• Violence
• Criminality
• Trauma
• Bullying
• Power dynamics & Powerlessness
• Relationships
• Spirituality

Counselling/Therapy Services

Struggles, problems and conflicts are part of the universal human experience. It maybe that awful feeling of unhappiness that won’t go away or that dreadful feeling of loneliness despite having family or friends in your life. It maybe that hollow feeling of emptiness that work, relationships, money, children can’t fill, or that unsettling feeling of ‘stuckness’ that you can’t seem to understand.

You feel anxious, depressed, angry, disconnected and lost, unable to experience a whit of joy. You feel bothered by an intolerable sense of shame and guilt that causes you distress, endlessly looking, but unable to find an escape.

Psychotherapy is about meaning and healing. It provides a safe space to understand yourself and situation better, and how your past has shaped your present. It will help you experience healing from pain you know of, and buried pain you may not be aware of that reveals itself in your present life in unpleasant ways.

The psychotherapy enterprise is not a race, but a gradual and lengthy exercise of the psyche that helps you develop new ways of observing, perceiving, thinking, and being, providing the opportunity for enduring change and growth. Although stormy at times, it is a hopeful journey to wholeness.

Counselling/Therapy Approach

Psychodynamics and psychoanalysis – self-psychology integrated with other psychodynamic and learning approaches.

Empathic understanding and interpretation are important bedrocks of my approach. I am of the view that the journey to change and growth begins with deep understanding (doesn’t stop there), as it may be difficult to effectively change what one does not understand. Essential to attaining self-understanding is understanding your past experiences, the pleasant and the unpleasant. In the words of William Faulkner “The past is never dead, it’s not even past”

My approach isn’t based on you avoiding what you feel or think, rather it leads you to a place where you develop your capacity to understand and tolerate your feelings and thoughts.

Background and Experience

Besides private practice working with adults and couples to find meaning and healing in their lives and relationships, my experience also spans across mental health hospital and community settings (forensic & general), working with clients towards transformation and improved functioning as well as working directly with colleagues from various disciplines to support their practice, growth and development. In addition to my theoretical, practice, research, and teaching endeavours, I have personally experienced the journey of healing, transformation and growth, and will be a fellow traveller.

Supervision Services

I provide supervision to health professionals and health workers who work in mental health and forensic settings. I also provide supervision to psychiatry registrars in the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) Fellowship programme.