Counselling & Psychotherapy

Counselling

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.

Psychotherapy

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 Therapy

Creative Therapy is an approach which involves creative activities within therapy sessions.  You don’t need to have any art skills and it benefits people of all ages.  In general, the aim is to help you:

• Communicate your thoughts and feelings that you may find difficult to put into words
• Make sense of things you may be struggling with and to understand yourself more deeply.
• Use the safety of the therapeutic relationship and space to explore thoughts, feelings and difficult experiences without the fear of being judged.
• Find new ways of looking at difficulties in your life and relationships and to gain a different perspective on things.
• Improve relationship with others.
• Develop compassion towards yourself.

Together we can decide whether working creatively would interest and benefit 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 of protecting us from the pain of those events.  Working creatively with a wide range of mediums opens the way to a gentles and less
threatening way of accessing those emotions and experiences within the safety of the therapeutic space.

Research has also shown how traumatic experiences can often get stuck in the body. Whilst painful emotions and memories may remain dormant and out of our conscious awareness, 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 and resolve 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 and painting
• Working with journaling, letter writing, fairy tales, poetry, music, books, photographs, and other similar mediums.
• We may also work with EFT or Tapping, breathwork, and guided visualization.

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