My Approach
I offer person-centered counselling for adults, but that doesn’t mean that I just sit there and listen, nodding occasionally like a therapist in a TV drama! Counselling is a two-way process, and I will work with you to make the sessions as useful as possible. We will regularly review how useful a session has been, and use this feedback to try to make future sessions better, and more productive for you. If a particular way of working on an issue isn’t being useful for you, and the counselling has got stuck somehow, I will suggest ways to try something different, or approach the same problem from a different angle, or with different tools.
There’s always a way to make progress, and although my training has given me counselling qualifications and techniques, it is you who is the expert on what’s working or not working for you.
My rule is not to try to blame the client if they’re not making progress, but to try something else.
People ask me, “What happens in your counselling sessions?” Sometimes we talk, often I listen to what clients say, and also to what’s missing in what they are saying – because often they don’t notice that part themselves and then we can talk about that, too. It is not like being interrogated, though – you decide what we talk about, and what we put to one side.
Sometimes clients need the time and space to sort out their own emotions in sessions, and so we can have periods of silence. There’s no pressure to do anything until you feel the time is right. I can make suggestions, but you are in charge. Sometimes I invite clients to do creative exercises (nothing scary!) that can help to move the counselling process along. It surprises clients that some simple exercises can help you to look at things from a new angle.
One of my favourite quotes about counselling and therapy is from Ernesto Spinelli, who said:
… and that’s a great description of what counselling is for – I help clients to relate to their past and present in a different way, because none of us can change the past, but we can change how it affects us today and tomorrow.
If you want tomorrow to be different, why not give me a call and we can talk about it.