Counselling Approach
Our work starts with an assessment to gather some history to explore what brings you to therapy and what you are hoping to be different.
HOW DO I WORK?
I work holistically meaning I am interested in the WHOLE of you – your thinking habits, your feelings and body sensations. As you share your story and notice how your body feels as you share your story, we are able to track unconscious patterning laid down from relational dynamics and experiences in the past. By bringing compassionate awareness to feelings/sensations that have been ignored or suppressed, supports you make new choices and helps you live a more authentic, integrated and stable life.
Note: It is important to appreciate that suppressing/ignoring/shutting down our feelings was what we learnt to do to survive. It was an appropriate, adaptive response, outside of our awareness.
Therapeutic toolbox
I use a variety of techniques as no single approach is appropriate for everyone.
In 2008 I trained as a Humanistic Integrative counsellor, specialising in:
Person Centered Therapy
Gestalt Therapy
and Transactional Analysis.
(For a more comprehensive explanation of each modality please see synopsis of approach
Voice Dialogue
Between 2014 – 2107 I trained in Voice Dialogue, from the Blagden Institute in Dorset. This is a powerful way to work with the different parts of ourselves. It has similarities with Internal Family Systems (IFS)
We all can recognise inner dialogues taking place inside of us. Quite often, these different selves can cause inner tension, split feelings and doubt. For example, everyone has a protector self – to keep them ‘safe’ perhaps from ridicule or shame. But you may also have a part that longs to create art however the protector part keeps showing up with ‘reasons’ why this is not a good idea. Voice Dialogue is a non-judgmental method to witness these different ‘selves; and guide people towards a better understanding of what motivates these separate parts. With renewed awareness we are able to make choices more aligned with the needs and desires of our present self.
TRAUMA
As a therapist, I am committed to learning the latest developments in healing trauma. Traditional psychotherapy works by exploring how the cognitive mind makes sense of the self in relation to the world. Because trauma is a survival response based on how our autonomic nervous system responds to threat, the cognitive brain is shut down and the emotional brain is activated (fight and flight) or the reptilian brain (freeze), depending on our capacity to manage the encountered threat. However because the emotional and reptilian brains don’t carry an episodic ‘time code’ in the same way the cognitive brain does, when the traumatic memory is re-triggered it feels like the trauma is happening again in the here and now, rather than being understood as something which happened in the past. The body behaves as though it is still under threat, and the rational mind doesn’t understand why. To work with traumatic stress, it is vital to understand the difference between top down (thinking mind) and bottom up (fight/flight/freeze) regulation.
As neurologist Antonio Damasio puts it, “the mind is embodied, not just embrained”.
ART THERAPY
I have a Person Centred Art Therapy Certificate and when appropriate use creative techniques, including art imaging and sand-tray in my counselling practice.
“Images, like dreams, tap into the world of spontaneous knowing, nothing to do with thoughts.”
Liesel Silverstone, Art Therapy The Person Centred Way (1993)
What is Sand tray?
Sand tray therapy is an expressive counseling method where a person builds an image/scene in the sand tray box using small objects/toys and the arrangement of the sand. This tactile process is a way to move beyond the limitation of words to process emotional experiences and relational dynamics safely through symbols and metaphors. Through creative exploration, unconscious processes are made visible in a three-dimensional form.
