Counselling is a regular meeting with a trained therapist where you talk about the parts of your life that are presenting challenges for you.

It provides you with dedicated safe space and time to examine your experiences, your relationships, and your relationship with yourself.

This helps you to develop your own understanding of what you are feeling and why, and consider if there are changes that would be helpful for you. 

My role in this is to accompany and guide you in this exploration, informed by psychological theory and professional knowledge about human development and relationships, while being genuinely interested in you as a person. xt goes here

Our relationships with others are often the parts of our life which bring us the most joy and the most pain. This includes relationships with intimate partners, family, friends, colleagues.

It is not always possible, or useful, to attend a type of group therapy to focus on our relationships. This might be because the people in your life do not wish to or can't go through therapy. It might be because there are patterns in your relationships, rather than a particular relationship, which you want to understand and perhaps change. Or it may be that addressing issues within a relationship is not comfortable or safe.

Having counselling for relationships as an individual can help you to;

• recognise and work on patterns  in your relationships which feel unhelpful or unhealthy for you

• develop relational self awareness so that you can show up in relationships authentically

• process experiences in past or present relationships which may be affecting you

• navigate difficult periods in relationships such as after separation or infidelity

Our relationships are systems and eco-systems. When we introduce change in the form of how we behave in a relationship, other people change how they respond to us. In this way we can affect change in our relationships.

A curious and supportive conversation about you, your life, your needs, your ways of approaching situations and relationships.

My work as a counsellor is to facilitate your exploration - compassionately, non-judgmentally, safely, adventurously - of what you are experiencing.

The aim is that you gain a deeper understanding of yourself and your responses to your experiences so that you can feel connected to what feels healthy for you and respond and make decisions from that place.

In counselling we will aim to;

• • Recognise and develop understanding about your relationship patterns. We will aim to do this with compassion towards you and those in your life.

  • Consider how your experience in relationships throughout your life may influence how you show up in relationships now.

  • Work carefully to begin any change which you wish to make. We will do this with respect to others in your life and primarily through identifying ways in which you can affect change, with awareness of personal responsibility.

    For many people this stage happens naturally, without any conscious change having to be made, but having space to reflect on these changes in therapy is helpful to consolidate them.

    For others it might be useful to use specific techniques and approaches to create specific change e.g. ways to communicate needs and boundaries to others. 

  • In all of this we will aim to create space to be with and to process experiences and emotions. Change and understanding do not come about through intellectual understanding alone, so spending time to really allow you to process the impact of previous and current experiences is an important part of therapy.