About Counselling
Counselling offers you the space and time to talk about any difficulties that you may be experiencing and help you to find new ways of coping with emotions or events that you are struggling with. It also helps you to know and understand yourself better and support you to make the changes you wish to see in your life.
Counselling is confidential; this means the material that you share with me in your session remains between you and me. There are some exceptions to this rule which we can discuss further if you wish to make an initial appointment or contact me for further information.
There are many approaches to counselling, I offer an Integrative Humanistic approach, combining Gestalt Therapy, Person- Centred and Existentialism. These forms of counselling complement each other to aid you in your exploration of yourself and your experiences.
Gestalt
When roughly translated the world Gestalt means "whole". Therefore Gestalt therapy is a holistic approach, including the exploration of feelings, thoughts, bodily sensations, memories, dreams and more. The aim of Gestalt Therapy is to raise awareness, both within oneself and how we act and react to the outside world. With this heightened sense of awareness we are able to recognise unhelpful aspects of our lives and explore ways of making the changes we wish to see. We often carry around with us unfinished business, sometimes from many years ago, that we are completely unaware of. Gestalt Therapy helps us to recognise this unfinished business and find a way to complete it so that we can let it go. Gestalt Therapy can be very creative and you may wish to paint, draw, use a sand tray and other resources during therapy.
Person-Centred
The key to a successful experience in counselling is the therapeutic relationship. Person-Centred Counselling focuses on the relationship that is built between the Counsellor and the Client. As a Person-Centred Counsellor I offer Empathy, Unconditional Positive Regard and Congruence. This means that I will greet you with understanding and without judgement whilst always bringing my true self into the relationship. A belief of Person-Centred Counselling is that as human beings we are born striving towards what we need, but along the way we receive messages from others, maybe our parents or a teacher as a child, that can send us off course. It is here that we can feel at odds with the world around us and maybe experience a sense of loss, anxiety or depression. Person-Centred Counselling helps us to work through our beliefs about ourselves and our world and rediscover what is truly ours and what we can let go of.
Existentialism
Sometimes it can feel as if we are stuck in a world that we did not choose and there is no way out, this can create a feeling of hopelessness. Existential philosophy helps us to come to terms with the things in our lives that we cannot change and helps us to recognise what choices are available to us to change the things that we can. It also helps us to accept responsibility for ourselves and our choices and enjoy the freedom that realisation can bring. Existential philosophy teaches us that a level of anxiety is natural and helps us to be courageous in our lives.
"There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them" - Denis Waitley
