To give you some idea what to expect, I’ll give you an idea of a typical counselling relationship.
– You fill in the contact form on this website.
– I’ll contact you to arrange a time to talk on the phone for a discussion of your needs.
– The call will generally last about fifteen minutes and will involve some discussion of your mental health needs, medical background and other person information.
– You let me know what time and day suit you and I see when I’m able to meet you. If this all goes well we agree a time for our first session and we meet in St Austell for an hour.
– We spend the first session talking about how we’re going to work together, setting goals and planning how long we think they might take to reach.
– We meet each week, probably at the same time, sometimes the sessions make us cry, sometimes they make us laugh. Sometimes both.
– Every month or two we check in with the goals and see if we’re headed in the right direction or if anything needs to change.
– When you decide we’ve done as much work as we can on that goal, we either say goodbye or set a new goal.
All of this can be discussed. As long as it remains safe and ethical to work together I am open to possible changes. For example, some clients want to meet only two or three times each month, sessions can be made longer if needed or the day we meet needs to move around other events in our lives.
My Counselling Approach
Counselling is something that is built on a therapeutic relationship, and so it’s as unique as that relationship.
This makes it hard for me to describe what counselling with me is like because it will depend just as much on you.
Some people want to just talk and let off steam. Some people want to understand themselves. Some people talk a lot and some people hardly talk at all. Some people like to draw and others like to stare out the window.
The idea is to find what is therapeutic for you. Sometimes this means having me there to talk to. Sometimes that means using counselling to find other activities in your life that give you what you need.
What I can say is that counselling is broad enough to hold all of these things.
I am qualified as an integrative therapist, which means I use different counselling approaches and ideas, often at the same time, to meet your needs of the moment.
My approach to counselling is built on the idea that we’re made up of different parts. I believe that when all these parts are working together and getting along then we feel whole, we have a greater sense of well-being. We feel able to live our lives through all the good and the bad.
When these parts are disconnected or they’re too painful to hear, we experience a lower well-being and we notice the difference. Stress, anxiety, aches & pains, uncertainty and spiritlessness.
While the counselling will always be about your goals and how you want to work, my underlying approach will always be to see if I can create connection between the different aspect of your self.
I am also qualified as a psychotheraputic counsellor, what this means is I have a done specific training on working long-term with people who have never felt OK in their whole lives.
Usually this happens when someone has a less than ideal environment growing up. This could mean abuse or neglect when, it could mean you’ve had a mental illness most of your life.
It could also just mean that you feel fine about your childhood but that there’s always been something not right or something missing. Maybe something happened to you later in life that you weren’t equipped to handle.
Working with these kinds of issues can be a big undertaking, lasting months or even years but can be immensely rewarding as you can find something you’ve always needed but never knew you were missing.
Counselling doesn’t have to be all talking, I also offer creative counselling with a variety of toys and props. Sometimes the parts of us that are disconnected need another way to communicate with us.
Used at the right time this approach can make sense of things that are hard to find the right words for, and offer experiences that are beyond words.