my approach to counselling

Awareness

Life is complex. You might have emotions that you do not fully understand. Your past or present relationships may have left you feeling bewildered, angry, isolated or sad. One of my aims as your counsellor is to help you to untangle things.  When you have a clear picture - an awareness - of where you are and what has happened, you will be in a much better position to see what changes you need to make.

compassion

The second part can be more difficult and is often more important. You may come to counselling with a sense that there is something wrong with you, that you are not enough or that you need to achieve something more in order to be valued. Perhaps you are experiencing guilt or shame. There may be things that you have done that do not make you feel proud.  My aim will be to help you to be kinder and more compassionate towards yourself, to feel that you are ok and to love being who you are.

What will happen

In our sessions, we might focus on earlier parts of your life. At other times we’ll talk about your current thoughts and emotions. We are likely to focus on your relationships to people in the past and the present, as well as with yourself.

It often feels better not to think about the really difficult things that have happened to us. We tend to avoid painful thoughts and emotions. Learning to allow those emotions in and process them in a healthy way is a large part of why counselling works.

The sessions will have two main aims. The first is to gain AWARENESS. We will explore the reasons why things are not right at the moment. These reasons can sometimes be complex and tangled. I will help you to tease them apart and see them more clearly. The second is the COMPASSION part. My aim is that you will feel nurtured, valued and cared for. You will not be judged. You will be accepted. This is a very potent aspect of counselling; I have seen it result in changes that have surprised my clients.

Of course, sometimes things will have gone really well. On these occasions, we will be celebrating your triumphs!

Inspirations

If you are familiar with theories of counselling, you will know some of the those that have inspired me. The main ones are the Person-Centred Approach, Mindfulness-based approaches, Gestalt therapy, Transactional Analysis (TA), Attachment-based therapy, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Compassion Focused Therapy. All of these theories utilize awareness or compassion, or both of these things, to promote healing.