How can therapy help you?
Counselling is your space – we’ll go at your pace and shape counselling to what you need. Here is a bit about how I work so you can get a sense of whether therapy with me is a good fit for you.
Talking
Just sharing how you’re doing can lift the weight off your shoulders. When you feel understood and not judged, it helps let go of difficult emotions as well as discovering more about the underlying causes of pain, anxiety or distress. What we talk about, and how quickly we go, is guided by you.
Mindfulness
Stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD all affect our body as much as our thoughts, like muscle tension, an upset stomach or feeling unable to relax. Mindfulness helps calm our whole body, quieten our thoughts and tune into what our body is telling us. It can helps us build resilience to manage difficult or painful emotions too.
Learning skills
When we’ve gone through something painful or traumatic, we might experience things that make day-to-day life really difficult - panic attacks, flashbacks or mentally beating yourself up, to name a few. Learning skills, like grounding or mindful breathing, can calm those responses and start to re-teach our brain and body to respond differently to triggers.
Getting creative
Sometimes it can feel like you’re stuck going round and round the same loop. Drawing, imagining, playing all help us get out of our heads and find a different perspective.
Cultivating compassion
When we have compassion for ourselves, we can begin to heal. But long held self-beliefs often dominate our thoughts and keep on telling us all the ways we’re not good enough. By learning about our brain and body systems as well as using tools like drawing and visualisation, we can pro-actively cultivate compassion, find new ways of thinking, and let go of shame.
Trauma informed
Your safety is paramount. If you’ve experienced something traumatic, or have PTSD, it can be really easy for therapy to inadvertently trigger you. To begin with, we’ll only work on helping you feel safe, learning to spot your triggers and reorientate yourself when triggers go off. If and when we both decide you’re ready, we will carefully work through difficult memories although there’s no expectation to do so. We’ll go at your pace and always make sure you feel comfortable and secure.
“What happens in between sessions is as important as what happens during sessions”
This is your journey. I’ll be there for you and with you each step of the way. I’ll help you process, show you tools, listen to you and support you. But I really believe only you can fix you. So when we learn skills like mindfulness or grounding techniques during sessions, its really important you’re able to practice them in-between sessions too.
My approach to therapy draws on 4 main models of counselling: