Counselling and psychotherapy

Counselling may be described as ‘helping you to help yourself’ and usually involves focussing on a specific problem or problems. Being really listened to, and discussing your problem with someone outside the situation, may be sufficient to help you develop a different perspective and find a solution. Counselling tends to be time limited, varying from, say, six sessions to six months. Regular evaluations can be a useful part of counselling as it helps track the counselling process and its effectiveness.

Counselling involves once-weekly 50 minute sessions for a limited period.

Psychotherapy may be described as  ‘helping you to know and understand yourself better’.  It involves finding out what lies below the surface of your everyday awareness, to help you with deeper mental and emotional issues or a problem that is longstanding and not easy to define. By exploring your life and relationships (past and present), therapy aims to help you to become more aware of your thoughts, feelings, actions and perceptions.  It can help to answer questions such as:

– why do I feel like this?
– why does this kind of thing keep happening to me?
– why do I always choose the wrong relationship?

Psychotherapy involves once or twice weekly 50-minute sessions over an extended period of time.

All kinds of people, of all ages, access counselling or psychotherapy. Both offer a safe and confidential space to help you explore what is going on.  Your concerns will be taken seriously and you will be listened to with acceptance and respect.

My approach: I practise ‘Relational-Integrative’ counselling and therapy. By ‘Relational’ I mean that I like to work collaboratively with you to reflect on and improve the relationships between the various aspects of your personality and between yourself and others.  By  ‘Integrative’ I mean that I have combined (and integrated) those parts of the three main therapeutic approaches:  Humanistic, Psychodynamic and Cognitive Behavioural (CBT), that I find the most helpful.

Practising Relational-Integrative counselling and therapy means that I aim to work with you in a flexible manner, and gear what happens to your specific needs.