Psychotherapy and Counselling during COVID-19

Over the last 9 months I have adapted my practice, in accordance with Government guidelines and those of my governing body, to rspond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently I am working in a blended way, using zoom and telephone sessions and also offering some face to face work. How we work together is discussed and decided according to individual client’s needs and my own circumstances and sitting in the framework of  the current guidelines.

Psychotherapy and counselling offer an opportunity to gain greater understanding of yourself and the difficulties you are experiencing so that healing and a greater sense of balance and choice is available to you in your life.

By exploring, with a therapist, the issues involved,  emotional and behavioural patterns can be seen and understood in a way that is different to self-exploration or exploration with another.

It is a collaborative process with you at the centre and the therapist facilitating an alternative awareness of the difficulties and issues you are struggling with.

Resolution and healing then become possible, and a greater sense of balance and choice is available to you. This can become reflected in the relationships and experiences you have in every day life.

The therapist will respect your values and your life choices.

I am a qualified counsellor and psychotherapist based in Emsworth with a background in therapeutic social care and expertise in emotional difficulties.

My training as a psychotherapist was integrative and creatively based. Since training as a psychotherapist I have worked within several different Further Education and Higher Education establishments offering counselling and psychotherapy to students and staff. When working with Macmillan I offered counselling and therapy to individuals and couples who are experiencing and living with cancer in their lives. I established my private practice seven years ago. Much of my work encompasses exploring with clients changes and trauma in their lives together with the concomitant difficulties that can arise at these times.

I was a personal tutor and part of the training team at a local BACP accredited psychodynamic training. Prior to working as a psychotherapist and counsellor I was a child care social worker working both independently and within the statutory sector. I worked extensively with children, young people and families, particularly those within the fostering and adoption framework.

My Approach

I work as a psychotherapist and counsellor. My psychotherapy training was integrative, creative, and comes from a humanistic approach. This means I hold a core belief that we have the capacity to heal ourselves, whatever that may mean for us, and therapy is one of the ways that can facilitate this process. I draw on the frameworks of psychodynamic, gestalt and transactional analysis thinking and the work of classical clinicians such as D Winnicott, J. Bowlby, and C Jung as well as  contemporary trauma understanding.

My role, as a therapist, is to offer an opportunity to discuss, explore and facilitate a dialogue that offers an opportunity for understanding, change and healing. Sometimes words can feel inadequate and using creative materials and resources can usefully inform the therapeutic work. This can provide an alternative way of communicating and expression. Sometimes it can be useful to give consideration to the links between the mind and the body, and sometimes it can be useful to explore difficulties in a more abstract way perhaps using images and metaphor.

The field of therapy and counselling is growing and expanding alongside neuroscientific developments. We have a greater understanding of the usefulness of ‘Talking Therapies’ and a greater awareness of how therapy and counselling can usefully contribute to the process of attending to the difficulties and issues which present to us in our everyday lives.

My initial role is to facilitate a preliminary discussion to arrange the first session.

If you would like to do this please contact me by telephone on 07919 050674 or email emsworththerapist@lindaellis.co.uk.

All communications between us will be dealt with in confidence and I respond to all enquiries swiftly.

Following our preliminary discussion or email exchange we will arrange an initial session at a mutually convenient time.

I am based in Emsworth, working in a private consulting room, with parking and 15 minutes walk from Emsworth Station.

The initial session is an opportunity for you to meet with me and for me to meet with you, to think about what has brought you to counselling and therapy, and to identify what you are hoping to gain from the therapeutic work.

We will give consideration to how many sessions feels right for you. Therapeutic work can be short term (generally 4-10 sessions) or longer term and more open ended.

In the initial session we can identify a structure to the work that fits with your hopes and expectations. This can be adapted and changed if needed.

I offer clinical supervision to psychotherapists and counsellors. This can be one to one or in a small group (generally two-three persons).

The frequency of supervision sessions can be flexible and agreed to suit the needs of the supervisee. I work with trainee and qualified psychotherapists and counsellors and offer face-to-face supervision and telephone supervision.

I see supervision as a collaborative process between the counsellor/therapist and supervisor to facilitate and promote safe, ethically sound and creative clinical practice. The supervision space is an opportunity for thinking and reflecting as well as holding a willingness to not know and not understand.

My supervision is placed within a humanistic and psychodynamic framework. Where appropriate, and useful, the supervision process can include the use of art materials and image.

I have been supervising and mentoring counsellors, psychotherapists and trainees for a number of years.

I worked as a supervisor when I was practicing as a social worker, supervising and mentoring social workers, social work trainees, volunteers and sessional workers.

I hold a certificate of clinical psychodynamic supervision and am a UKCP approved supervisor.

“Supervision has been defined as ‘thinking about thinking’, and this can mean a multitude of different and difficult situations arising in the therapeutic dialogue and demanding analysis, understanding and elucidation. It is a process of conceptualizing and consulting with another mind.” – Gertrude Mander

“Like Alice, who was transformed by her journey through the looking glass, and the strange and surprising experiences she had there, the supervisory pair or group, need to engage in a suspension of disbelief or negation of ordinary reality in order to be open to the unconscious communication from the patient and to find the object waiting to be found or created.” – Mary Thomas

I work with couples.

Couples come to therapy for many different reasons, but always with an understanding that there is an unacceptable level of distress and/or dissatisfaction within the relationship.

The work of couple therapy is to explore and understand what each partner within the couple needs, and to identify and understand what changes are needed to bring the relationship to a different place. Emotional connection is crucial to this process, when we cannot find love and connection the emotional distress and chaos in us deepens.

Couple therapy holds an understanding that each of the couple brings to the relationship their own way of relating to another, and this is based on early learned patterns of behaviour and relating. When there are difficulties in a relationship it is useful to identify how these learned patterns and behaviours might be present in the relationship. This offers an opportunity to facilitate understanding and hence an exploration of change and healing.

Healing is about finding a place that holds some resoloution and the potential to move forwards for each of the couple.

“Romantic love is not the least bit illogical or random, but actually an ordered and wise recipe for survival, it is an attachment bond” – Dr Sue Johnson

“Essentially, the task of the therapist is to move back and forth slowly exploring each partner’s experience in the relationship and offering an empathic response to the underlying feelings and fears of each person.” – Jim Crawley and Jan Grant

Enquiries are welcome. Please contact me:

Mobile: 07919 050674

Email: emsworththerapist@lindaellis.co.uk

I am based in Emsworth, working in a private consulting room with parking and 10 minutes walk from Emsworth train station.

“The process of growth is, it seems, the art of falling down. Growth is measured by the gentleness and awareness with which we once again pick ourselves up, the lightness with which we dust ourselves off, the openness with which we continue and take the next unknown step, beyond our edge, beyond our holding, into the remarkable mystery of being” – Stephen Levine