How can counselling and therapy help?
Psychotherapy and counselling offer an opportunity to gain a greater understanding of yourself or your couple relationship and the difficulties you are experiencing. From that position of understanding you can heal and develop a greater sense of balance and choice in your life.
By exploring the issues involved with a therapist, emotional and behavioural patterns can be seen and understood in a way that is different to self-exploration, talking with your partner or a friend.
It is a collaborative process with you, or you and your partner, at the centre and the therapist facilitating an alternative awareness of the difficulties and issues you are facing.
Through this process resolution, healing and choice then become possible, This can become reflected in the relationships and experiences you have in every day life or with each other.
The therapist will respect your values and your life choices.
People come to therapy and counselling for many different reasons:
A sense of unhappiness or loss of control in your life.
An experience of trauma
Anxiety, depression and low mood
Feeling overwhelmed and/or a sense of an absence of feeling
An awareness that your patterns of behaviour are not helpful to you
What is the difference between counselling and psychotherapy?
Psychotherapy and counselling are terms that are regularly used interchangeably. The processes involved are often very similar.
You can think of them separately by considering psychotherapy as a process of exploring and resolving difficulties through understanding the source of the difficulty and the on going presence of that difficulty in your life or lives. Meanwhile the counselling process is also focussed on exploring and resolving a difficulty, but in the here and now rather than by considering the source of that difficulty or the chronic nature of the difficulty.
Psychotherapy and Counselling during COVID-19
Since March 2020 I have adapted my practice, in accordance with Government guidelines and those of my governing bodies (UKCP and BACP), to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently I am working in a blended way, offering face to face work and also zoom and telephone sessions. We will discuss and decide how we work together based on your individual and my own circumstances, ensuring that our way of working sits in the framework of the current guidleines. For each of us the impact of the pandemic has been defined by our own personal circumstances and our own experiences both past and present. Navigating a path through this impact which is respectful, creative and healing is vital.
“I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” –Carl Jung