Counselling is a regular meeting with a trained therapist where you talk about the parts of your life that are presenting challenges for you.

It provides you with dedicated safe space and time to examine your experiences, your relationships, and your relationship with yourself.

This helps you to develop your own understanding of what you are feeling and why, and consider if there are changes that would be helpful for you. 

My role in this is to accompany and guide you in this exploration, informed by psychological theory and professional knowledge about human development and relationships, while being genuinely interested in you as a person. 

All of us can have experiences which bring up difficult emotions or reactions for us, but it can often be difficult to talk about them with people in our lives, which can leave us feeling alone, unheard, confused, frustrated, low, angry, or scared.

These experiences might be things like;

• patterns  in your relationships which feel unhelpful or unhealthy for you

• ways of reacting to situations which affect how you feel able to engage with life

• a particular life experience which was difficult and which you would like support to work through

• difficult or negative emotions about yourself

Counselling allows you to process these experiences safely, without risk to your own needs, or risk to the relationships in your life. It gives you a place to prioritise yourself.

Counselling also allows you to be fully honest about your experiences (even to a level you might not have been with yourself) because what you talk about in counselling will not be judged. You don’t have to worry about the consequences of saying something out loud to experience relief or to just see whether it makes sense.

And you get to do all of this with the guidance and support of a trained professional who has your best interests at heart. You will never have to take action or make a decision that you are not ready to make, and the experience will be collaborative - us working together for you.

A curious and supportive conversation about you, your life, your needs, your ways of approaching situations and relationships.

My work as a counsellor is to facilitate your exploration - compassionately, non-judgmentally, safely, adventurously - of what you are experiencing.

The aim is that you gain a deeper understanding of yourself and your responses to your experiences so that you can feel connected to what feels healthy for you and respond and make decisions from that place.

In counselling we will aim to;

• • Recognise with integrity and honesty what you are experiencing.

  • Become aware of why and how you are experiencing these patterns in your life.

  • Investigate, with compassion, what generates and fuels these patterns to give yourself deeper insight and therefore more agency over your own experiences. This might involve looking at your past and making these connections together. 

  • Consider how you could make changes in your life, if you wish to, and support you through therapy as you do this in your own time.

    For many people this stage happens naturally, without any conscious change having to be made, but having space to reflect on these changes in therapy is helpful to consolidate them.

    For others it might be useful to use specific techniques and approaches to create specific change e.g. managing anxiety symptoms / anger responses while also doing finding ways to change these happening in the first place. 

  • In all of this we will aim to create space to be with and to process experiences and emotions. Change and understanding do not come about through intellectual understanding alone, so spending time to really allow you to process the impact of previous and current experiences is an important part of therapy.