Are Counselling and Psychotherapy Right For Me?
Counselling and psychotherapy have the potential to help for a wide range of issues. You may have a general dissatisfaction with life, that somehow it has lost its meaning, or you feel stuck. You may be experiencing anxiety, depression, anger, difficult life events like job loss, redundancy, bereavement, divorce or an accident.
You may have relationship issues, family or friendship problems, or work stress, like dealing with difficult work colleagues. It may be hard to adjust to new life circumstances or family arrangements: a move, a new job, a baby, midlife issues. I also work with clients with creativity issues - like blocks, of fear of failure. At its most effective, I believe psychotherapy can produce lasting change and transform people’s lives.
What’s the next step?
If you feel you might like to try counselling and psychotherapy, please do contact me to discuss setting up a first session. Do feel free to call me on 07470 154819 or email me and I can answer any questions you might have.
Will It Work?
While there are no 100% guarantees, there is a strong likelihood that it will. Hundreds of scientific surveys have demonstrated that psychodynamic or talking therapy helps people to understand and overcome their emotional difficulties. In particular a landmark, highly respected meta-survey (an overall analysis of many surveys) provided scientific evidence that psychodynamic therapy had a strongly positive outcome in helping people feel better about their problems and produce change. The key findings are that the positive change (called ‘effect size’ in medical research) was roughly three times greater than the most widely used anti-depressant medications and that the benefits of talk therapy were found to be lasting, and often increased, when measured well after therapy had finished.
What To Expect
Counselling and psychotherapy are not about giving advice. Instead they help you to discover what is emotionally true for you and help foster your own inner resources so you may decide what, if any, changes you wish to make. I see counselling and psychotherapy as an actively collaborative partnership where I work alongside you. Your agenda is key.
It’s my job to really try and step into your shoes and understand things from your perspective so I can be of most help to you.
I will support you to talk about what’s troubling you and guide you as we try and make sense together of your problems, how you see yourself, the world and how you operate within it. This in turn, may give you more choices and freedom in how to live your life.
How Long Do Counselling and Psychotherapy Take?
The amount of time people choose to spend in counselling and psychotherapy varies greatly. Some people may want to work short term and feel they only need a limited number of sessions to address a specific issue. Others feel that working in depth over a longer period is a valuable way to explore the underlying patterns of thoughts and behavior behind their bad feelings and see therapy as an investment in themselves. Usually people don’t know when they start counselling how long they want to come for and the number of sessions they have tends to be a natural decision as part of their individual counselling process.
What’s the difference between therapy and coaching?
Coaching is about practical planning to achieve targetted goals – like losing weight or getting a better job. Counselling and psychotherapy work deeply and supportively with your difficult feelings, to help you become more self-aware and know yourself better. Through a greater understanding of who you are, how you operate, and the repeated patterns of feeling, thoughts, and behaviours you might have that may no longer be helping you, counselling and therapy can give you greater freedom from emotional difficulties and more choice in how you negotiate life.