Therapy
What are counsellors/psychotherapists?
Counselling and psychotherapy are two words that mean just the same thing. As a counsellor / psychotherapist I offer you the space to talk with me on a regular basis so that I can support you in exploring your feelings and experiences so that you can understand them better and then use that understanding to make different choices if you wish to do so. It is different from talking with friends or family because we I will be able to remain objective and non-judgemental. As a counsellor / psychotherapist I am also trained and experienced in ways of thinking about how and why people come to feel and act as they do.
Talking therapies and EMDR
We will meet online or face-to-face and talk about what is on your mind. I will be guided by you in what we discuss and it is up to you where we start and what you wish to bring up in sessions. I might ask questions that I feel will help build understanding. I will not judge you for how you feel or act but simply work to help you to understand your choices and ways of living. I do not generally provide advice about how you should live but I can offer suggestions about some issues such as techniques for coping with anxiety.
In addition to providing talking therapies I also provide EMDR Therapy. EMDR is a specific type of therapy for helping with psychological trauma and involves a particular treatment protocol and techniques.
When you are traumatised by an overwhelming event, or by a series of difficult events, your natural coping mechanisms can become overloaded. These disturbing experiences can then remain ‘unprocessed’ and continue to cause you distress. EMDR works by helping you to process your traumatic memories. EMDR therapy does involve talking with me, just as other therapies do, but the process also involves recreating eye movements, rather like those that you have in dream sleep, by a simple process of following my hand movements across your visual field. These eye movements will enable your brain to process your traumatic memories so that the lose their painful intensity.
If you are struggling with the tell-tale signs of trauma such as difficulty sleeping, flashbacks, hypervigillance, intense physical reactions, difficulty concentrating, panic, then EMDR could be for you.
How can counselling and psychotherapy help you?
I can help you when you come to a point in your life where you are having feelings that are impacting negatively on how you live and what you think about yourself. I can support you to stop feeling stuck and as if you are going around in circles feeling lost for ideas about how to move forward. This might be due to a specific event that has impacted upon you or it might be that it’s a succession of things throughout your life that have accumulated. I hope that our sessions will help you to understand yourself better, to like yourself more, to stop blaming yourself for choices that you have made, and to believe that it is possible to live in a way that makes you happier.
Who do I work with?
I work with adults age 18+. I have experience of working with diverse clients in many different settings including the voluntary and private sectors and the NHS.