How i work.
What modalities or approaches do i use?
Person Centred Counselling.
Created by Carl Rogers, an American Psychologist in 1959, Person Centred Counselling (also known as Client Centred or the humanistic approach) is based on the therapist values of empathy, being congruent and having unconditional positive regard for my client - you!
Experiencing person centred counselling, is where you can feel like you can express yourself fully in relationship with your therapist. You are the expert of your experience and will be at the centre of your therapy.
The therapist is your companion, alongside you in a way where you are able to access your own wisdom, knowing and felt sense. Together, you can begin to see and understand yourself in new ways and can provide a firm core for long-term developmental change
EMDR.
Eye Movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing.
EMDR is an evidence based and world wide accredited therapy, that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of traumatic life experiences.
Treating trauma is an emerging field, where evidence is showing that often, mental health, behavioural issues and substance use (among others) may develop as a response to traumatic experiences.
It has been widely assumed that trauma requires a long time to heal, however many studies show that by using EMDR, people can experience the benefits of therapy, that once took years to make.
EMDR is absolutely incredible.
EMDR helps support your brain to integrate trauma experiences so they feel less distressing, less vivid and have diminished impact on your life. EMDR can help to reduce symptoms of trauma, such as flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, anxiety and other PTSD Symptoms.
EMDR can also be used to treat self limiting beliefs, addiction, anxiety and distress. When working with children and young people, EMDR is used creatively, with art and sand tray and can be utilised by caregivers and when at home.
If you are considering EMDR please contact me for more information or to answer any questions.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) Informed Parts Therapy
Rather than historical approaches which have generically perceived ourselves as being singular – Me. Myself, or I - IFS-informed parts work begins with a simple, normalising understanding: we are naturally multiple. We all have different aspects of ourselves that show up in different situations. We might feel confident and grounded in one moment, then suddenly anxious, withdrawn, self-critical, or angry in another. Rather than seeing this as inconsistency or dysfunction, approaches like IFS recognize that when we feel stress or are faced with an overwhelming experience or trauma, aspects of our personality may need to become organized around protection and survival.
When something feels too big, too frightening, or too much to process at the time, the nervous system adapts. Certain parts take on protective roles — managing, pleasing, striving, numbing, avoiding, or staying hyper-alert. Other parts may hold the emotional pain, fear, shame, or helplessness connected to what happened.
For trauma survivors, this framework can bring great relief and empowerment with new understanding of how we adapted to survive. Protective behaviours that once felt confusing or self-sabotaging start to make sense and intense emotional reactions can be understood as younger or overwhelmed parts of you trying to keep you safe.
In this work, we don’t push parts away or try to override them. We slow down, build safety and help you develop a grounded, compassionate centre that can gently relate to and approach each part with curiosity and compassion. As protective parts begin to feel understood rather than judged, they often soften. As wounded parts feel witnessed rather than exiled, they can begin to release what they’ve been carrying.
For many, this approach reduces shame, increases self-compassion, and creates a sense of internal coherence. Instead of feeling hijacked by reactions, we begin to experience more choice, more internal harmony and begin to feel more integrated.
Parts Informed EMDR
Parts Informed EMDR utilises the wonderful processing effectiveness of EMDR, combined with a Parts led approach to create gentle, compassionate and deeply powerful therapy.
Using techniques from Internal Family Systems (IFS) and other Parts led approaches, Parts Informed EMDR uses curiosity and compassion to understand your parts and to begin to develop new ways of relating and supporting your parts so they can begin to work more cohesively together. So rather than experiencing your internal world as confusing, with high levels of conflict or arguments between parts, or one part dominating our experience, we work towards our parts learning how to work together as a team – like an orchestra, with each part unique but united.
The inclusion of EMDR provides our parts with a deeply effective way to reduce distress, feel more connected and strong, develop new understanding and realisations in a gently transformative and profound practice.
If you have had jarring or overwhelming experiences with EMDR in the past but would like to consider this approach again – Parts Informed EMDR is very respectful, gentle and paced so that all of our parts feel safe and are ready to process what we have experienced, keeping us stabilised and centred.
Creative Therapies.
When we try to express ourselves - words can feel so limiting. And if you have experienced trauma before you learned how to talk, you may not have a language to express your experience.
Creative therapies such as using Art, Sandtray and Play Therapy stimulates different parts of the brain and can help us to access new perspectives through symbol and metaphor. These new perspectives can bring fresh insight and encourage new ways to understand and respond. This way of expressing experience is vital for children who learn through play, and supports healthy development and integration.
ACT Therapy.
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy
ACT is a wonderful therapy that aims to help us find ways to safely engage with difficult thoughts and feelings, identify what is really important to us, and commit to moving towards being the person, we really want to be.
The term acceptance is used to describe an alternative to our instincts that want us to avoid negative-or potentially negative-experiences. It is based on the awareness that we as humans will experience suffering as a natural part of life and that we can make an active choice to allow unpleasant experiences to exist, without trying to deny or change them.
We are not only what happens to us.
We are the ones experiencing what happens to us.
ACT believes that we are more than the sum of our experiences, thoughts & feelings. ACT uses mindfulness as a basis to help us be in contact with the present moment, without judging ourselves or the experience, which can help us understand how we react to challenges and develop a new self-concept.
In this process we discover together, what is really important to us, what ACT calls- our values. Values are qualities that guide our choices and what we choose to work towards in any given moment. In ACT, we use tools to help us commit to make choices to live our lives in accordance with the values that are meaningful to us.
Overall, ACT combines mindfulness skills with the practice of being present, to support the development of psychological flexibility and self-acceptance to create the life we really want.
While it may sound complex - the experience of ACT is gentle, simple, compassionate and profoundly empowering.
Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy is a respectful, judgement free approach to counselling which sees you as being the expert in your own life.
Therapists who use this approach are respectfully curious about your own understanding about yourself, and tend to ask questions, to which we genuinely don’t know the answers. We believe that you hold the knowledge, beliefs, abilities & guidance within you, even when you may not believe this to be the case.
You can determine the direction our conversation may take, with the therapist walking alongside you in our discovery together.
Narrative therapy also considers the problems you experience as being separate to yourself.
When we experience a problem for a long time - we can begin to fuse with the problem or believe that we are the problem, such as - ‘I am an anxious person.’
Narrative therapy sees the problem- to be the problem, and you are separate to this. For example - ‘The anxiety I experience, affects me a great deal.’
In therapy, we use language skillfully to consider problems in this way which can help to being new perspectives and support us to develop a discreet identity, that is separate to the challenges we experience.
As humans, we have daily experiences of events that we interpret and seek to make meaningful. We create stories about our lives to find a way to explain or make sense of them. As we give meaning to our experiences, this meaning forms the plot of our own unique story, becoming a narrative.
As its name suggests, Narrative therapy sometimes involves ‘re-authoring’ or ‘re-storying’ conversations.
Through this kind of therapy, we are supported to begin to create a new (or more useful) story about our life, which can offer us new ways to relate to our past experiences and create a different narrative for our future.
Transpersonal Counselling.
Incorporating spirituality & existential aspects
Times of great change can affect us in surprising ways. We may notice our world changing around us, or experience a big life event, such as a death of a loved one, becoming a parent, a sudden divorce or ill health, which can have us asking questions about what may have previously gone unexamined.
We, as human beings, have an extraordinary capacity to create meaning from the big experiences of life. In this process we can begin to discover other aspects of ourselves that otherwise may have remained hidden or untapped.
How we experience and make sense of our world can take us into the unknown parts of ourselves, bring up questions about our purpose, challenge our beliefs and change how we may understand to walk in the mystery of our being.
Having these thoughts and questions can be deeply unsettling and unanchor us from our known world and challenge our close relationships.
Having a focused therapeutic space can be helpful at these times.
