BENEFITS OF COUNSELLING

• Improvement in general mood

• Increased self-esteem, confidence, and relationship satisfaction

• Gaining coping skills to manage stress more effectively

• Set and achieve realistic goals

• Get help to express feelings and manage strong emotional reactions

• Greater ability to communicate needs, feelings, and thoughts more openly to others

• Less engagement in unhealthy or destructive behaviours and replacing them with healthy behaviours

• Coming to terms with past experiences

• Increased ability to set boundaries

• More self-acceptance and decreased levels of anxiety and depression

RISKS OF COUNSELLING

• Lack of progress towards therapy goals

• Relationships with other people in your life may be impacted

• Uncomfortable or painful feelings may get worse at the beginning of therapy (this is usually temporary)

• Counselling may bring up painful memories causing you to feel guilt, sadness, anxiety, anger or frustration

• Feelings of vulnerability when sharing sensitive information

• Financial cost of therapy

• Feelings of distress when therapy ends

• Gaining insights about yourself that are difficult to accept and work through

• Experiencing your own comfort or resistance when being challenged by your therapist

COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL THERAPY

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) aims to help you become aware of negative or inaccurate thought patterns so that you can approach challenging life situations with more clarity and respond more effectively. In a therapy session, we may break things down into steps and a) Identify which situations in your life are currently troubling you, b) Help you become aware of the emotions, beliefs, and thoughts you have about these situations, c) Challenge thought patterns and behaviour that may be contributing to the problem, and d) Reshape negative or inaccurate thinking in order to create new, healthy habits. 

SOLUTION FOCUSED THERAPY

Solution Focused Therapy (SFT) focuses on an individual’s goals, and present and future circumstances. The SFT approach encourages the individual to form a vision of the future whilst offering support in developing abilities, skills, and the resources needed to successfully achieve their vision. The aim is to help you identify and develop the tools within yourself to cope with challenges and manage symptoms, and for you to recognize that on some level, you already know what changes you need to make.

NARRATIVE THERAPY

Throughout our lives, we create narratives or stories that help us to make sense of the things that happen to us.  Some of these narratives serve us well, and others can be restrictive or sometimes even damaging. The Narrative Therapy approach gives the individual an opportunity to explore how their narratives came about, and to reframe their problems within a more accurate and preferable context. The goal of this approach is to empower the individual in collaboration with the therapist, and to show how we can make room for other stories or narratives.

COMPASSIONATE INQUIRY

Compassionate Inquiry is an approach that aims to reveal who we are underneath the appearance that we present to others. In a therapy session, we will explore the unconscious dynamics that control your life and how to free yourself from those patterns. When we uncover the core stories that you are telling yourself unconsciously, we will identify what beliefs are tied to those stories and how they manifested. This gives you the possibility of letting those stories go, along with the control they have over your life.