Counselling FAQ

This question is a little tricky to answer because I adapt my way of working in response to the person in front of me. For example, if I have someone in from of me who hasn’t felt listened to and really needs that, then I will focus on showing that I am listening. If I’m working with someone who wants to learn about psychological concepts then I will support that by sharing what I know. The point is that I’m responding to what you’re needing from me.

That being said, there are some common threads in my way of working:

• I work collaboratively. This means that while I have training relating to mental health, I don’t know better than you about your own life and experiences. Instead, you bring what you know and observe, I bring my knowledge, and together we work on finding a way through your questions or difficulties.
• I approach what you bring with curiousity and lack of judgement.
• I work relationally. While the things you bring from the outside are important to therapy, the relationship we build is also important to pay attention to. Therapy can be a a space for you to try unfamiliar or difficult things, e.g. being honest about how someone makes you feel, saying no, being vulnerable, etc. The relationship has to feel safe and tended to in order for that to be possible.

A counselling session is essentially a very long conversation with someone. However, it will feel different from conversations you may have in your day-to-day life. For one, the focus will be on you rather than equally shared with your therapist – this is usually reflected in how much (or little) a therapist talks (very roughly, about 20% of the time).

A counsellor will also usually not offer advice, tell you what to do or share their opinions with you. Instead the aim is to find out how you feel and how you think about your experience. And it true that therapy is often concerned with feelings, wanting to draw them out and understand them. The idea is to go beyond the ‘facts’ of what happened during the week or in the past, and find how it affected your internal world.

This is why therapy can feel very vulnerable, and can in some cases leave you surprisingly tired afterwards. My recommendation is to find a therapist you feel you can come to trust. To give you more of an idea of what you might want to look out for in a therapist (good and bad), I recommend this video:

The first information I need is your availability and a brief overview of why you want to start therapy. You can let me know via the contact page or my email at the bottom of this page.

I offer a free initial 15 minutes call over the phone or zoom so you can get a sense of whether I might be the right fit for you. This first call is arranged over email.

If you’d rather skip that step, or if you’re happy with this first contact, I will invite you to your first session. The first session is an intake assessment, meaning that I try to get as much information as I can about you. Equally, this is a chance for you to get to know me better: do you like how I respond to you?

If, after all this, you let me know that you want to start working with me, we go ahead with sessions on a regular basis. There is some paperwork to sign (contract and privacy notice) and then we’re good to go.

‘Humanistic’ is an umbrella term for many different therapy approaches. What they have in common is a trust that people have an inner compass that points us towards what is right for us. It’s not uncommon for life to pile things on top of this compass however, so part of the work in therapy could be to recover access to it. Because there is a belief in that sense of direction, humanistic counsellors will usually let the client set the pace and make decisions about what they want to address in therapy.

Humanistic therapies also tend to be holistic, in the sense that they look at the whole of a person rather than focusing on one specific problem in isolation.

Lastly, the relationship between client and therapist is very important in humanistic therapies. Indeed humanistic practitioners consider that healing happens in relationship rather than through any one set of techniques or type of intervention.

Out of the many humanistic therapies, I trained in three:

• Gestalt therapy
• Person-centred
• Transactional Analysis

The next section explains more about what these three look like.

All three modalities have things in common, since they are all under the humanistic umbrella. For a brief summary of each, I recommend this BACP A-Z of therapeutic approaches. Below I explain how I am influenced by each approach:

Person-Centred therapy (PCT)

PCT emphasises empathy and staying close to the client’s experience. When I am leaning on PCT I don’t make interpretations, instead I try to put myself in your shoes and be where you are with you. I really like PCT’s idea of congruence, which essentially means matching how you feel on the inside whith how you act on the outside.

Transactional Analysis (TA)

TA is really good at breaking down psychlogical patterns into easily understandable phrases or ideas. It’s a great approach for clients who come to therapy for understanding their patterns of behaviour.

Gestalt therapy

Gestalt principles consider that people and their environment are really closely interlinked. Mind and body are also not considered distinct, so you may hear me ask about where you feel something in your body.

Gestalt places a lot of focus on the present moment, which means that a session starts with what is happening in that moment for you. This may lead to talking about the past of course, but I always come back to what is happening in the here and now.