Short-Term Counselling
Counselling provides a focused space to explore immediate concerns and specific challenges. These shorter journeys typically last 6-12 sessions, offering clarity and practical strategies for current difficulties. Through reflective conversation, we work together to untangle complex feelings and develop new perspectives that support your wellbeing.
Longer-Term Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy offers a deeper exploration of recurring patterns and underlying experiences. This extended journey allows us to discover your age-appropriate strengths and gradually clear your relationships from unhelpful behaviors and thoughts. Through consistent weekly sessions, we create the safety needed for meaningful transformation and lasting change.
Session Information
Initial Assessment
Your first session serves as a mutual assessment. I evaluate whether your needs align with my areas of competence, while you determine if my approach feels right for you. This session introduces the therapeutic process and addresses any questions you might have before establishing our working agreement. 90 minutes offered. If further assessment sessions could support your decision making process, then three more sessions, each 60 minutes, can be agreed on.
Practical Arrangements
Sessions last 60 minutes and take place weekly at a consistent time, creating helpful structure and predictability. I offer both in person and online therapy via secure Zoom connection and telephone sessions. Payment is made via bank transfer in advance of each session, with specific policies regarding cancellations outlined in our agreement.
Confidentiality and Ethics
Your privacy forms the foundation of our work together. As a BACP accredited therapist, I maintain strict confidentiality within the ethical guidelines of my profession. We’ll discuss these boundaries in detail during our initial session, ensuring you feel secure in sharing your experiences. UK GDPR complied with.
Areas of Specialism
Parent-Child Therapy
This relational dynamic is lifelong; it even remains beyond separation via death. For some families the opportunity to heal misperceptions can arrive early on in life, for some others later on in adult years. If therapy works, its result can feel like holding your newborn baby again whilst being embraced by a loving midwife.
The importance of pregnancy and the first 12 months facilitating a secure attachment dynamic is clarified by Dr Karl Heinz Brisch, MD, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychotherapist, in “SAFE – Sichere Ausbildung fuer Eltern” which can be translated as educating parents on how to facilitate secure attachment for their babies, before and after the birth.
Bereavement
Bereavement is another part of life. One can never know when it is going to happen, sometimes out of the blue leading to shock and sometimes its signs can be felt in advance. This is an experience that is faced by everyone at one point, regardless of one’s background. Everyone has a choice on how to react and whether to accept or to deny it.
The start of life involves pain, it is mainly physical but it can also be emotional. Living is full of encounters that can cause pain and suffering. Departure from life also includes these dynamics due to diverse reasons.
The option of therapy can help with a person’s capacity to remember through processing past emotional experiences, then to make sense of them and also to see what has been good and what is still good. Having a balanced perspective can allow us to feel freer and lighter.
There is a specific tiredness that comes with bereavement, even if you do nothing, you might feel exhausted.
Bereavement journey can be postponed, but it can never be stopped. Compassionate and empathic presence of others can facilitate a gentle process for this navigation.
Gradually and according to one’s own pace the acceptance that life has changed forever follows; including the realisation that you continue to relate to the departed one within your existing attachment pattern.
Jerry Sittser’s book “A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss” might be an option to find comfort.
ISBN-13: 9780310219316
Being a Carer
Again, I would like to acknowledge this dynamic as another part of life that a person does not choose freely when a loved one faces life altering changes, which also has an impact on their relationships. A child or a young person might have to face growing up too quickly. An adult might face diverse difficulties in caring if their attachment pattern has been challenging or dysfunctional.
However, this time can be a precious opportunity to make sense and move towards healing one’s attachment related wounds. If this can be a choice, then the related impact on the ‘bereavement journey’ could be liberating.
Again, in therapy, one would not feel alone but accompanied respectfully to move forward.
Professional carers can also benefit from therapy as an external support and an additional option to prevent burn-out.
Loss & Trauma
Again, no one on earth can escape these life dynamics. An experience is traumatic if the person is not ready to face it due to being not equipped to deal with it. If one trauma is not made sense of, then the following traumas cannot be processed. One would be busy to defending against the pain of the first experienced trauma, thus there is no space in one’s emotional world for the following traumas.
When we are young, our navigation capacity has primitive defence tools. In Transactional Analysis this is referred to as the “child life script”, which is appropriate for that level of development. Through the years this script starts to feel inadequate. The results of one’s navigation pattern no longer bring the hoped result in relationships. In therapy it can be possible to develop that script at an adult level, “adult life script”.
The impact of trauma, when there is no language to express it, gets stored in the body. One can become aware of the impact of the physical symptoms. In complex trauma, one’s capacity to differentiate what is current and what belongs to past experiences diminishes or disappears. Children express their traumatic experiences through play. If their vocabulary is sufficient, their games can have verbal narrative as well. The narrated stories signal the perception of the child or the young person. This is not about what has really happened but the impact of that experience. Two people, regardless of their ages, might witness the same trauma but how they experience this differs based on their age related capacities.
