A high percentage of counsellors, psychotherapists/therapists work within only one set approach., i.e. Person-Centred. I, however, strongly disagree with this technique to help clients meet their full potential and personal goals set during their time in therapy.

I work with each individual as ‘a whole’, meaning I consider various aspects of the issues you bring into therapy, via the use of an integration of various therapeutic approaches, as well as thinking about your process in life, through a different lens. Therefore, helping you to connect and use these ideas to help make sense of what is happening in your life, and why this is. This means, I continuously work with all clients within a unique manner.

The psychodynamic approach is derived from psychoanalysis. Psychodynamic therapy is designed to help clients explore the full range of their emotions, including unconscious and past experiences in which shape their current behavioural and thought processes.

By making the unconscious elements of their life a part of their present experience, psychodynamic therapy helps people to understand how their thoughts, feelings and behaviours are affected by unresolved issues and unconscious feelings. This concept promotes the building of an accepting and trusting counsellor-client relationship, encouraging you to talk about your childhood relationships with significant people as well as past experiences that may have made certain impacts on you as a child and therefore enabling you to gain a greater understanding of yourself and your past experiences and how these have shaped your personality and patterns of life in the present.

Becoming aware of these processes can help you to gain the tools needed to take control once again of your life, relationships and your future. Looking back on the past and exploring where your difficulties originated from, can help you to understand your feelings, widen your thinking and evoke a greater insight into your problem. By doing so, implementing coping strategies to resolve any future reoccurring issues is enabled. Psychotherapy can help with deeply repressed traumas, conflicts, relationship issues.

The humanistic approaches are especially suited to anyone feeling lost, struggling with low self-esteem and generally looking to improve their well-being. This approach focuses on the individual as a whole. It encourages people to think about their feelings and take responsibility for their thoughts and actions.

The emphasis is on self-development and achieving your highest potential rather than on problematic behaviour, allowing individuals to recognise their strengths, creativity and choices in the ‘here and now’, respecting your lifestyles and beliefs and valuing you as Facilitating empathy, acceptance and honesty, helping you to recognise your inner qualities and potential in discovering new solutions to your problems and cope more effectively in the future. Humanistic counselling enables you to discover self direction in moving forward.

Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy is an action-oriented form of psychosocial therapy that assumes that maladaptive, or faulty, thinking patterns cause maladaptive behaviour and “negative” emotions. (Maladaptive behaviour is behaviour that is counter-productive or interferes with everyday living.)

This approach focuses on changing an individual’s thoughts (cognitive patterns) in order to change their behaviour and emotional state of mind. The way we think about situations affects the way we feel and behave. If we view a situation negatively, we may experience negative emotions and feelings which lead us to behave in an unhelpful way. As a counsellor, I will help you identify and challenge any negative thought processes you hold to change the way you deal with future situations in a much healthier and positive way.

CBT can be helpful issues like; depression, anxiety, stress, phobias, obsessions, eating disorders and managing long term conditions and relationships.