What is Counselling and Psychotherapy?
Life brings personal and emotional difficulties and challenges, and you may feel that you need help to meet these situations. You may feel that you want get more out of life or to understand yourself, or your situation, more deeply. You may just feel that something isn’t right. Talking to a therapist will help you to clarify the issues you face and to find solutions.
I chose to study Integrative Psychotherapy as it gives me access to a range of models that try to understand human behaviour. I can look at your issues from different perspectives, and creatively use a blend of techniques to suit you.
I start from the position that all human beings have an inbuilt desire to grow and develop. Sometimes our experiences in life lead us to deny ourselves what we most want, or put others’ needs before ours, or to believe that ‘there is something wrong with me’. The aim of therapy is to help you to understand more about yourself, so that you can make choices that are in your best interests.
You are the expert on you, and you know best what you need and want. My job is to help and support you in your exploration of yourself, using my understanding of psychological theory and my broad experience as a therapist. Hanging on to old patterns of behaviour and ways of doing things can be the biggest obstacle to growth and greater happiness and wellbeing. Therapy helps you to become aware of what you do and why you do it. Once you have awareness, you can choose whether to continue, or to do things differently. This can feel risky, and it’s my job to support you to do things differently if you choose to.
What’s the difference between counselling and psychotherapy? It’s often thought that counselling is a ‘lighter’ method, and deals with current difficulties or problems without delving too deeply. It is often a shorter process, of six or twelve sessions, and is often what is offered by the voluntary sector, or through a GP. Psychotherapy tends to be more longer term and explore how events in the past may affect the client in the present. In actual practice, there is quite a bit of overlap between the two, and I use both terms, as I can provide both, and people often find the prospect of counselling less threatening.
