Counselling & Psychotherapy

Counselling and Psychotherapy are generic, interchangeable terms (in the UK) for the therapeutic service of talking confidentially on a consistent basis, exploring personal obstacles with a trained and qualified therapist. Some people come to therapy to look at a particular problem or obstacle to their wellbeing, others come with a general sense of unhappiness, depression or anxiety.

You may be having understandable symptoms because of your experiences, such as being overwhelmed by negative feelings. Maybe you just feel drained by trying to organise your life around avoiding these symptoms as best you can, or you are wondering why is it that I am reacting disproportionally to things happening in my life. Possibly you are having difficulty maintaining close relationships and feeling disconnected or maybe you simply need a place to let go of things that are bothering you, work through a low-mood, feelings of low self-esteem, explore self-criticism and procrastination.

Counselling typically involves a shorter term duration, where we work on specific challenges that you are currently facing like a bereavement, life transitions or work related stress. 

Psychotherapy, on the other hand, tends to be longer term or open ended because we work on multiple and more in depth issues that may have originated in your past, and are creating difficult symptoms that affect you in your day to day life. For psychotherapy the nature of the work requires an increased amount of practical therapeutic experience and studies with substantial breadth and depth in this area.

Whatever the purpose and focus of therapy for you, being able to feel safe or have safe connections with people, being truly heard, seen and accepted are essentially some of the most important aspects for our mental health.  I aim to work with you to co-create a therapeutic relationship which helps you to explore the issues that are important to you and make the changes you want to make, in order to lead a more fulfilling and well-balanced life.