Counselling, Psychotherapy & Working Creatively 

Counselling & Psychotherapy

Counselling offers you a safe, private space to talk about your issues or difficulties in complete confidence, without being judged, allowing you to explore your life, relationships and emotions in a way that is not possible with friends and family.

Counselling helps you:

• Gain a deeper understanding of yourself, your relationships and current situation
• Identify and review the patterns and triggers for your habitual thoughts, emotions and behaviors
• Connect to, express and release your emotions safely
• Identify and reconnect to your true self, your unique qualities, strengths and resources
• Explore your choices and options
• Change your limiting beliefs and conditioned responses so that you can respond from an empowered position
• Let go of negative thoughts and emotions so that you can move forward in your life

Whilst counselling can be short or long term work, Psychotherapy is a longer term work. It is generally an explorative process whereby the root cause of your thoughts and feelings are explored with a view to bringing awareness, understanding and insight. Through our work together you gain deeper understanding of yourself and your past experiences. Feelings, thoughts, wishes, memories and dreams can be explored within the safety of our therapeutic relationship.  The aim of therapy is to help you develop a greater degree of self- awareness which then enables you to respond differently to people and circumstances in their life.

Creative Arts & Working Creatively With Trauma

Together we can decide whether working creatively would be beneficial to you. This approach to therapy is particularly helpful for trauma survivors, who may be unable to verbalize or put in words their feelings or experiences.  Oftentimes, the impact of traumatic experiences are deeply hidden from conscious awareness as a way to protect us from the pain of those events.  Working creatively with a wide range of mediums opens the way to a gentler and less threatening way of accessing those emotions which may be buried deep within.  Research has also shown that trauma can often get stuck in the body. Whilst painful emotions and memories can be trapped or stored on a cellular level, the impact of those traumatic events may still be experienced as physical symptoms. In other words, the body remembers what the mind cannot. An effective and safe way to release or discharge these stuck emotional energies or memories is through somatic work. Here, creative work
can be a useful way to help give expression to these experiences and can be a key part of the healing process.

We may work together creatively in several different ways, including:

• Working creatively with symbols, pictures, cards, stones, figures, puppets
• Sand trays, drawing, painting, etc.
• Working with journaling, storytelling, fairy tales, poetry, bibliotherapy, phototherapy, and other similar approaches.
• We may also work with EFT or Tapping breathwork, and guided visualization.

If you find his way of working helpful I may ask you to do some artwork or other exercises to explore your feelings, both in session and between sessions.