Work With Me
How I can support you
I can help you identify and understand:
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Patterns and behaviours of abuse
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Learn to trust your instincts again
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Rebuild self-worth and personal boundaries
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Develop tools to protect your emotional wellbeing
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Make empowered choices about your relationships and future
I offer a compassionate and personalised approach specialising in short term counselling for people who may only require a few sessions or are on a tight budget/short of time. I also provide long term psychotherapy for complex and multiple difficulties. My practice integrates various tools and techniques tailored to help you achieve your goals, discovering and gaining trust of your true identity.
As a registered member of the BACP (British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy), I am dedicated to ongoing learning and development to ensure I provide the best support for my clients.
Here is a more detailed list of issues I can help with:
Abuse, ADD / ADHD, Anxiety, Autism spectrum, Bereavement, Child related issues, Depression, Health related issues, Infertility, Life coaching, Loss, Menopause, Neurodiversity, Obsessions, OCD, Personal development, Phobias, Post-traumatic stress, Pregnancy related issues, Redundancy, Relationships, Self esteem, Self-harm, Spirituality, Stress, Trauma, Women's issues, Work related issues
Approaches I use
I am an integrative counsellor trained in person centred, CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) and psychodynamic. I may also use other therapies including, transactional analysis (TA) and schema therapy. I work with adults above the age of 18.
What does each modality cover?
Person centred
The main objective of the humanistic, non-directive approach is to support clients in discovering who they are, what their experience is, without being influenced by external factors. Person centred theory states that people can grow to their full potential with the right conditions being met. The therapist creates a safe space for the client without contaminating them with their own ways of being. The therapist uses three core conditions of the approach: empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard (UPR).
I use person centred therapy from the beginning of therapy to understand you on a deeper level, respecting your values. I use the core conditions to help establish a threshold to positive change and increase trust in the therapeutic relationship. These conditions are fundamental as they form the basic elements of not only building safety and trust but also empowering and supporting you with exploring your inner world.
CBT
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is a collaborative approach that studies how a person interprets current situations, how they may have developed emotional distress, and why they still exist. There is a close connection between the factors of thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and physical sensations. When at least one of these factors are changed, it influences the others. The client decides what the goal(s) are for therapy and the therapist supports them by challenging their negative automatic thoughts, feelings and unwanted behaviours. Scaling is used to clarify the intensity of any of these factors between 1 and 10 to understand the depths of the problem. It can be used to track a client’s progress through therapy.
Negative automatic thoughts are changed with thought records by understanding evidence for and against a particular thought and how you believe in it. Unhelpful thinking styles are identified and changed and unwanted behaviours are sometimes worked through with graded exposure. A variety of different tools and techniques are used to help you problem solve including coping cards.
I will ask you questions so you feel more confident with your own answers and ways forward. At the end of therapy, relapse prevention is used to assist you in having an effective evidence-based plan for moments of difficulty. As your CBT therapist, I can help you to become your own expert at CBT skills.
Psychodynamic
The main objective of the psychodynamic approach is to explore and understand unconscious drives, early childhood experiences and internal conflicts. These conflicts impact thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. The goal of therapy is to study the mind, increase self-awareness by uncovering hidden emotions, unresolved issues from the past and how they affect current behaviours.
In the assessment, depending on your goals for therapy, I may gather a history of your early life, how you interacted with your family and how your caregivers may have treated you/how family members behaved and how things have been in the family up to the present time. I will support you in discovering more of your unconscious by asking appropriate questions. For example, we may study bodily sensations and when you may have first experienced these feelings. We uncover repetitive patterns in your thoughts and behaviours. We identify and explore unmet emotional needs that may have previously been outside your awareness and how they still affect you in the present. We explore distressing defence mechanisms, for example, repressed thoughts and feelings, conflicts, and anxieties. Transference is often identified in sessions where you may redirect onto me a feeling, or an expectation from a relationship earlier in your life.
Transactional Analysis (TA)
This approach increases your awareness of how you interact both with yourself and others. A key concept is understanding your three ego states, parent, adult and child and how they influence your thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
The goal is to help you strengthen your adult ego state by living more in the here and now, rather than be influenced so much from the past.
Schema Therapy
This approach focuses on deep rooted negative patterns or themes from your past. When we have been emotionally abused or neglected, for example, we have unmet emotional needs. The goal of therapy is to identify these unmet needs, how they show themselves in your thoughts and behaviours and support you to gain a more healthy balance.
As an example, a person may identify as having a self-sacrifice schema where they always place themselves last. In therapy, their sense of responsibility to others would be explored. Interventions such as developing a healthy adult mode and allowing others to take care of them may start to address their unmet needs.
You may not know exactly what you would like to gain from therapy sessions! We can explore what you find challenging in a problem, situation or relationship to reach the heart of the matter.
You may already know your therapy goals, but need some support in how to reach them. The pace of therapy will be based on what suits you and your circumstances.