Maria Antonieta Olguin Cigarroa, UKCP Accredited Psychotherapist

Maria Antonieta Olguin Cigarroa

Welwyn Garden City AL7 English, Spanish
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Maria Antonieta Olguin Cigarroa, UKCP Accredited Psychotherapist

Maria Antonieta Olguin Cigarroa

Welwyn Garden City AL7 English, Spanish
Shortlist Share

My Approach

I am a UKCP accredited Integrative Psychotherapist, having had experience working on a short-term and long-term basis, both in the public and private sectors in the UK with people of all walks of life (+18/adults only), presenting a wide range of issues such as depression, anxiety, relationship problems, etc. I have also had specialist training and have gained years of experience working with trauma, PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and Complex PTSD. I am also an EMDR Europe Accredited Practitioner.

Being an integrative therapist means that I acknowledge and value the uniqueness of each person as no one single approach can suit every person, therefore, in my work, my integration is tailor-made in response to each client's presentation and unique needs.
My training to become an accredited Psychotherapist was comprehensive, demanding and lengthy, which also included my own personal therapy. It also includes a re-accreditation every 5 years, with yearly renewals, which also requires keeping engaged in CPD (continuing professional development).

HOW CAN PSYCHOTHERAPY HELP
We may all find ourselves sometimes needing another person to talk to or support us at times or someone who can ‘walk with us’ through a transition time.
On other occasions, we may feel worried and/or confused about our past or present circumstances, experiences, issues in relationships, etc. that can lead us to feeling without motivation or not knowing what do.
Sometimes in our lives we may have also lived very difficult and/or traumatic experiences that may have left us feeling shaken, even years after the event, finding it difficult to move on.
It is not always easy to talk to close ones about certain things and taking that first step can be quite difficult, but psychotherapy can certainly help during all these processes.
Psychotherapy can also offer a place for exploration for those who are considering a change in their life or for personal development.
In my practice I offer you a confidential, compassionate and non-judgmental space where you can talk about and explore things that are important to you within a helping relationship. Psychotherapy offers a confidential, neutral space to work through hard feelings, increase insights, enable behavioural, emotional and psychological change and growth, helping us to find new perspectives to understand and manage things.
If you would like to have a free consultation, please contact me and we can discuss further how my approach can support you during this time.

Note: I only work ONLINE at the moment with clients who are working with me face-to-face and sometimes need an Online session. Therefore a hybrid approach is OK, but I also require to have face-to-face sessions with my clients too due to the way I work.

HOW DO EMDR AND SENSORIMOTOR WORK TO PROCESS DISTRESSING MEMORIES/EVENTS
"We don’t survive trauma as a result of conscious decision-making. At the moment of life threat, humans automatically rely upon survival instincts. Our five senses pick up the signs of imminent danger, causing the brain to turn on the adrenaline stress response system. Later, we may pay a price for these instinctive responses: we have made it without bearing witness to our own experience" (Fisher, 2023). During moments of alert, high anxiety, stressful situations, our nervous system simply wants to make sure you get out of there (fight or flight) or keeps you safe by freezing you or shutting you down (e.g. people who cannot fight or flee situations). This means that encoding memory in those moments is not a priority, but simply getting you to be safe. When your brain can’t process these stressful or distressing events, because the focus is on getting you away from danger, then this memory or experience does not get fully processed and it therefore remains fragmented with implicit (unconscious) and explicit components. Implicit components, such as a sensations in the body, tension, holding the breath, emotional overwhelm, impulses, sounds, smells, etc. can become activated in the present by similar (or remotely similar) elements in the environment (or internal reminders), but they are not felt like memories, they are simply re-experienced in the present.
Therefore, the Sensorimotor Approach together with EMDR can provide you with the interventions that can finally help you process and integrate those fragmented components of the experience/event/memory so that you do not get triggered in the here and now anymore. Undoubtedly, traditional talk therapy is an important part of resolving traumatic experiences, but sometimes it may lack“…techniques that work directly with the physiological elements, despite the fact that trauma profoundly affects the body and many symptoms of traumatized individuals are somatically based...” (Ogden and Minton, 2000).

LENGTH OF THERAPY
Therapy length can vary from short term for specific issues to long term therapy where more deeply-rooted issues that may include past traumas, developmental issues (attachment inadequacies, relational trauma), etc. may need a longer period of work; as the work progresses the depth of the exploration can bring about new themes that clients were not aware of before.

About Me

I am a fully qualified/accredited psychotherapist and member of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). I adhere to its code of ethics and practice. I am also member of a) Regent's School of Psychotherapy and Psychology, and b) Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy College.
I am also an EMDR Europe Accredited Practitioner.

TRAINING AND QUALIFICATIONS:

- EMDR Europe Accredited Practitioner. This has been awarded by the EMDR UK Accreditation committee.
Practitioners are therapists who have been supervised in their EMDR practice beyond the standard training and demonstrated their competence to an EMDR Consultant.

- Certificate (Level 1), 93 hours, Dysregulation, Survival Defenses, and Traumatic Memory of the SPI (Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute): Certificado en "Psicoterapia Sensoriomotriz para el tratamiento del trauma". I've completed this course again to reinforce my knowledge and update my information according to advances in Neuroscience and other changes in trauma treatment.

- EMDR trained therapist with Richman EMDR Training Ltd.

- Certificate (Level 2) 180 hours: Emotional Processing, Meaning Making, and Attachment Repair of the SPI (Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute) Training Program. Find me on: https://sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org/therapist-directory/m-antonieta-olguin-cigarroa/

- Certificate (Level 1) 80 hours: Affect Dysregulation, Survival Defenses, and Traumatic Memory of the SPI (Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute) Training Program in Affect Regulating, Attachment, and Trauma. I am also registered with SPI

- Advanced Diploma in Integrative psychotherapy (ADIP)(Regent's University London) Systemic and psychosexual therapy; gestalt and focusing approaches; critical psychopathology; Cognitive Behavioural Therapy; Jungian and Transpersonal approaches.

- PGdip in Psychotherapy & Counselling (Masters of Arts, Level 7) (Regent's University London) Psychodynamic, existentialist and humanistic theories & therapeutic approaches.

- Foundation Certificate in Psychotherapy & Counselling (Regent's University London)

- MEd Master of Education (Cantab) (Cambridge University)

- PGCE (University of Hertfordshire)

- BA (Hons) 1st Class (University of Hertfordshire)

I work with

  • Individuals
  • Private healthcare referrals

Special Interests

Like all UKCP registered psychotherapists and psychotherapeutic counsellors I can work with a wide range of issues, but here are some areas in which I have a special interest or additional experience.

Many people presenting anxiety issues have benefited from the Sensorimotor body oriented approach because anxiety is often accompanied by specific physical symptoms associated with a state of autonomic arousal such as accelerated heart rate, shaking, trembling, shortness of breath, etc. and the Sensorimotor bottom-up interventions can help clients learn to regulate these responses as these primitive areas of the brain are often not affected by just “talking” in therapy. You can find me in the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy website: https://sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org/therapist-directory/m-antonieta-olguin-cigarroa/
In 2021, I further completed the EMDR (Eye Movement training with Richman EMDR Training Ltd. This has also been a great addition to my knowledge and interventions, which also provides a perfect complement to the Sensorimotor Approach, which I use during the preparation phase. EMDR is an evidence-based type of therapy for PSTD and trauma or any unprocessed experience that may still cause disturbance in the present “as the memory contains the distressing emotions, beliefs and sensations of an earlier time”, making us experience the world, others and the self in distorted ways with the influence of the past. EMDR was developed by Francine Shapiro in 1989 and it has been extensively researched “…showing EMDR therapy as a helpful treatment for disorders such as anxiety, depression, OCD, chronic pain, addictions, and other distressing life experiences (Maxfield, 2019)”. You can learn more about what EMDR is and its 8 phases at EMDRIA org: https://www.emdria.org/about-emdr-therapy/
Please refer to the Trauma and EMDR sections.
Personal life experiences have made me become deeply interested in trauma and it keeps motivating me to continue training and deepen my knowledge about trauma and its legacy. After my accreditation, I completed specialist training in Affect Dysregulation, Survival Defences, and Traumatic Memory (Level 1) with the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute (SPI), which imparts professional training in somatic (body) psychology. I then further completed Level 2 also with SPI on Emotional Processing, Meaning Making, and Attachment Repair (180 hours) for developmental wounds. Trauma is pervasive and the same traumatic event might affect each person differently, as an event is experienced as traumatic according to the person who experienced it. “Trauma can be defined as anything that subjectively feels too much, too fast, too soon (e.g. too young), too much for too long (e.g. long term stressful experiences), or not enough (e.g. neglect) for too long.” How an experience affects us will depend on many different factors such as age at the time of the traumatic incident(s), support at the moment and/or after the trauma, nature of the trauma, internal and external resources, etc. Sometimes trauma is not about what happened to us, but it is related to witnessing or hearing about others going through traumatic experiences, leaving us traumatized. Some of us might not even be aware that what we have experienced was a traumatic experience and we take it as a normal part of living or part of growing up (Adverse Childhood Experiences, ACEs), unaware that perhaps we have adapted to what, in actual fact, was a difficult experience for us at a young age, not having yet the capacity to cope or deal with things effectively or an unsafe environment or a life threatening situation and we live our lives now according to that experience (often unaware of our adaptations), having been left with some symptoms such as flashbacks, emotional and physiological dysregulation, emotional overwhelm, angry outbursts, high levels of anxiety, wanting to isolate, fear and hypervigilance, feeling numb or disconnected, etc. We all deserve to be heard and validated in our own experiences, but after difficult or traumatic events we often move on quickly to join life again, without allowing ourselves or perhaps not being allowed by others or circumstances, time to process these experiences, to grieve, feel angry and/or sad about what happened to us or others, unable to talk to others because they or we want us to simply ‘move on’. The Sensorimotor Approach together with EMDR can provide you with the interventions that can finally help you process traumatic experiences/events/memories so that you do not get triggered in the here and now anymore. Undoubtedly, traditional talk therapy is an important part of resolving traumatic experiences, but sometimes it may lack“…techniques that work directly with the physiological elements, despite the fact that trauma profoundly affects the body and many symptoms of traumatized individuals are somatically based...” (Ogden and Minton, 2000).

Types of Therapies Offered

  • Integrative Psychotherapist

What I can help with

  • Anxiety
  • EMDR
  • Post-Traumatic Stress
  • Stress
  • Trauma

Types of sessions

  • Face to Face - Long Term
  • Face to Face - Short Term
  • Online Therapy

Welwyn Garden City Office


Welwyn Garden City AL7
Hertfordshire

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Cost:

Free initial consultation.

My current fee is £55 for a 60-minute face-to-face or Online session.

EMDR sessions are between 60 and 90 minutes: £55 for a 60-minute session and £70 for longer than 60 minutes. My fees are reviewed annually.

UKCP College

  • Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy College (HIPC)
Maria Antonieta Olguin Cigarroa

Maria Antonieta Olguin Cigarroa

Welwyn Garden City AL7

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