Expert Therapy Backed by Professional Experience and Qualifications

About Me

I am Dr. John Loewenthal, a psychotherapeutic counsellor passionate about guiding individuals and couples through meaningful and transformative therapy. Through an empathic and analytical approach, I can help you to deal with life’s difficulties, to come to new realisations, and to arrive at new ways of being.

I am specialised in relational therapy and have experience across different therapeutic settings helping individuals and couples facing personal and relational challenges. My therapeutic work is informed by an extensive background of research and university teaching. I am attentive to how people’s lives are shaped by family, culture, psychology, and society and to the difficulties that people face in love, work, life, and death.

How I Can Help

I work with individuals and couples facing a range of challenges, including:

✔ Anxiety, depression, and self-esteem issues
✔ Relationship difficulties and communication struggles
✔ Workplace fulfilment and career aspirations
✔ Family expectations and pressures
✔ Pursuits of meaning, purpose, and transcendence
✔ Existential boredom and a search for something more
✔ Questions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, migration, identity and belonging
✔ Intergenerational relationships and responsibilities
✔ Ageing, loss, and life transitions

Whether you have struggled for a long time or are plunged into crisis, I offer warm and professional support and intervention. My therapeutic style is empathic, collaborative, and philosophical.

An Existential-Analytic Approach to Therapy

At Thrive Together Psychotherapy, our work is informed by an existential-analytic approach. Existential therapy offers a space to engage candidly with the exquisite possibilities, mortal horrors, and everyday boredoms of our existence. Therapeutically, I can help you to consider questions of freedom, responsibility, authenticity, and identity as you navigate the life that is uniquely yours. Psychoanalytic therapy engages how unconscious processes formed by past relationships and events continue to influence emotions, behaviours, and relationships.

Therapeutically, we can identify and process longings, anxieties, defences, and unresolved conflicts that may hinder your growth and relational patterns. My therapy training also includes pragmatic approaches that can help you to imagine possibilities and work on strategies to make meaningful changes in lifestyle and behaviour.

Clinical & Academic Experience

I have helped people of diverse backgrounds and identities to overcome a range of mental health struggles and relational issues. These challenges range from inner states (anxiety, depression, self-esteem, mood) to communication difficulties to existential and relational crises. I have experience at other therapeutic organisations such as NHS Talking Therapies and Relate. I am now dedicated to helping clients at Thrive Together Psychotherapy. Alongside, I am actively involved in academic research, teaching, and public engagement in the field of mental health. I work for the Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action at SOAS, University of London, where I am also conducting a research project on lifelong learning through psychotherapy. I have taught at many UK universities including the University of Edinburgh and the University of Oxford where I continue to teach a lifelong learning course on what makes life meaningful.

Alongside my Diploma in Relational Counselling, I hold a First-Class BA from the University of Oxford, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from Oxford Brookes University. My therapeutic training was inspired by my doctoral research into people’s aspirations, which illustrated the profundity of accompanying people in meaningful conversations. I realised the widespread yet subtle and often silent nature of mental health struggles. I am lucky to now have the skills and training, and the right personality, to help people as they face the challenges that life brings.

Helping You to Heal, Learn, and Grow

If you are struggling or seeking support, I am here to be of help.

I offer emotionally attuned and intellectually insightful sessions in Weybridge and online.