Therapy for Adults
When you are facing difficulties and find yourself feeling low, overwhelmed or lost, it can be hard to find a way forward.
Counselling and psychotherapy can offer a safe space, a time to feel really listened to, understood and accepted.
I can provide you with the opportunity to make sense of your feelings, thoughts and experiences, in a calm space, away from the pressures of your everyday life.
How Can Therapy Help You?
The Impact of Trauma
You might have experienced something in your life - an event or situation that was traumatic. The impact of this experience can have a lasting effect.
In moments of danger, our bodies prepare to fight, flee the situation, or freeze in the hope that the danger will move past us.
Trauma symptoms evolved to help us recognise and avoid further dangerous situations quickly. But, for some people, the body and mind continue to perceive the threat of danger long after the event has passed and/or it can feel as if they are back there reliving it (sometimes many times over).
Therapy can help you:
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Restore a sense of safety & calm
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Understand what you went through and how the trauma changed the way you look at the world, yourself, and others
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Develop skills to handle the distressing thoughts and feelings
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Enable your traumatic memories to be processed (at a pace you are comfortable with) and integrated with your other memories, restoring a sense of control
Anxiety & Depression
Most of us at some point in our lives will have experienced anxiety or low mood. It can last days/weeks months or years.
Look at the check lists below and see if you can relate to any of the psychological or physical symptoms that anxiety/depression alone presents.
Psychological symptoms can include:
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Feeling worried or tense a lot of the time
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Not being able to relax
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Disrupted sleep
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Difficulty concentrating
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Feeling irritable
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Being extra alert
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Being tearful
Physical symptoms can include:
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Increased heart rate
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Breathing faster
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Palpitations
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Headaches
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Chest pains
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Feeling sick
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Sweating
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Loss of appetite
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Tingling in fingers and toes
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Feeling as if you are in a dream-like state
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"Butterflies" in your stomach
Therapy can help you
Reading this is the first step to recovery. You have recognised that things need to change for you to feel better.
I can help you find the underlying cause and establish coping mechanisms that can support you through a difficult time.
Self-Esteem & Confidence
Self-confidence is about the trust or faith that you have in yourself and your own abilities. Self-esteem is the opinion you have of yourself.
Not feeling confident in ourselves can have a very negative impact on day to day living, affecting our social life, work life, personal life and even how successful we are in life.
Lack of confidence can lead to:
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Not progressing in your career
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Avoiding going out socially or in groups
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Withdrawing from activities
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Feeling insecure
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Not creating new challenges
Learning To Create More Positive Thinking Patterns
A key underlying cause to low confidence is negative thinking patterns that become habitual.
Learning how to break these thoughts and create positive thinking patterns is a key to successful confidence building.
Changing our thoughts and beliefs about ourselves increases our self-esteem; in turn this will improve our confidence levels.
Relationship Issues
Relationship issues are one of the most common reasons why people seek therapy.
Do you recognise any of the following :-
Conflict and stress
Chronic relationship conflict or stress can negatively affect your mental health. Relationship problems can affect your self-esteem and physical health, or lead to anxiety, depression or a sense that feelings are overwhelming and hard to manage.
Trust
Trust is a key part of a relationship. However, the behaviour of others, or difficulties in past relationships, may make it hard for you to trust.
Putting up emotional barriers
You might put up walls to avoid getting hurt. You might be aware that you push people away, then let them in, and end up getting hurt.
Holding onto feelings
Thinking negatively about outcomes and fearing the worst may make you hold back. Fear of asking for what you need can cause resentment to build, and sometimes feelings can erupt.
Your Individual Needs
No two people are exactly the same, and neither are their problems. I therefore seek to assess your individual needs with compassion, understanding and caring.
As an integrative therapist, I draw upon my knowledge and experience to help me to understand what has brought you to therapy and how to support you to heal and make changes.
An Integrative approach incorporates elements of different approaches to meet the individual needs of each client.
Creative Therapy
Creative therapy focuses on developing and expressing images that come from your feelings, thoughts and beliefs, rather than what you see in the outside world.
No creative expertise is necessary to experience therapy in this way. If you have experienced emotional traumas in your life, creative therapy can help you to express and manage feelings and regulate your body's reactions to stress.
If you find the idea of talking about painful life experiences daunting, art therapy is a way to externalise emotions that just feel to hard to speak out loud.
Creative therapy can help you process emotions and feelings that you are struggling with, so you can begin healing.
The Therapy Room
My therapy room provides a calm space away from everyday life.
In my therapy room you will find a selection of art materials and objects.
On this page you will see some examples of therapeutic activities available.
Activities
I can offer you the chance to work with:
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Creating images with paint, pastels and crayons
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Sand tray therapy
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Creative writing
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Role play work
