HOW I WORK
Are you wondering what I will do or say as your counsellor..?
My approach to counselling is to accept wherever you are at the moment, find out where you want to be, figure out what's holding you back, and highlight the ways you can achieve your goals, using your own strengths.
This is a 'person-centred', solution-focussed approach that concentrates on your own unique story, and how you can continue to write it as you go along. I have had training in a variety of modalities. Person-centred counselling aims to work out what is best for you, as opposed to using a formulaic 'treatment'.
Sometimes I might offer some tried-and-true techniques to help with a particular problem. Some examples include:
- Relaxation Exercises
- 'Psychoeducation', to help you develop new relational and behavioural skills
- 'Cognitive Behaviour Therapy', to help shift the beliefs or attitudes that are no longer helping you live your life
- 'Here and Now' discussions, that use counselling conversations as a practice for real life
- 'Interviewing', to invite you to consider altering the habits that harm yourself or others
- 'Sandplay Therapy', to help you explore your unconscious world
Each of these can give you tools for coping with your problems. You can choose whatever works best for you.
If your life has become difficult due to stress or trauma, we can develop skills and strategies for staying calm and strong in the face of whatever it is that 'triggers' you. When you can manage your feelings better, we'll work at understanding how those triggers gain power over you - and then you can take that power back!