What is Counselling? What is Psychotherapy?
Counselling and psychotherapy are specialised types of interpersonal relationships to help clients explore what they're going through in a safely contained and supportive environment. It is a helping relationship predicated on a qualified practitioner assuming a facilitative role in assisting clients in their psychological growth, maturity and development.
Counselling relationships feature a conglomeration of relational qualities evidenced to be growth-promoting. These therapeutic conditions are conducive to clients exploring their experiences uncontaminated by judgment or evaluation. As a result of the provision of these conditions, particularly the therapist's attentive understanding and unconditional acceptance of the client's personhood, clients can safely approach their emotional distress and arrive at solutions at a pace that suits them.
The client is prized in their totality and empowered to reconnect with their authentic thoughts, feelings and emotions. Clients can disentangle, reevaluate and discover their experiences anew and find a sense of clarity about themselves and their situations. The counsellor will sit alongside their client to find out want they want to get from their life, which honestly communicates their true self. This therapeutic process allows clients to retrieve their heretofore buried strengths and move forward in a way that's true to them.
The counselling and psychotherapeutic relational dyad contain boundaries of vital importance. These professional boundaries provide security and safety for the client and the practitioner. For example, a therapeutic hour, typically fifty minutes in duration, is maintained in the interests of both continuity and consistency. The value of confidentiality is crucial to containing sensitive information and promoting a climate of trust.
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What can I expect from you in a counselling session?
I will cultivate a therapeutic space epitomised by the qualities of trust, safety, warmth, and unconditional respect. I will not be dispensing advice nor give you directions but caringly work alongside you as a sensitive and empathic companion. My efforts will focus on working with you, free from any semblance of judgmentalism or expectation.
This non-directive approach creates a therapeutic space where we can work together to understand better what's happening to you. My role as a person-centred counsellor will be to support you in utilising your therapy in a manner that resonates with you and your individual needs. In this sense, you can freely talk about and explore your inner world at your discretion.
By being alongside you, allowing you to give shape, form, and substance to what you're feeling and discerning what you want to get from your life now, you will be able to move forward in new and creative ways. These evolvements can include learning more about yourself and experimenting with various strategies to help you better deal with whatever difficulties you're facing.
After amassing experience working with children, adolescents and adults in a voluntary and private practice counselling setting, I sincerely believe that the relational components that constitute the classical person-centred approach effectively heal emotional wounds and promote growth. I will do my utmost to facilitate and maintain these therapeutic conditions so that I may be of the most excellent assistance to you on your counselling journey.
My Approach to Counselling & Psychotherapy
As counselling is practised and conceptualised in various ways, it's essential that you're abreast with information about what distinguishes my approach from disparate counselling methodologies. In addition, information about my therapeutic approach is critical in making an informed choice about whether or not my therapeutic practice is proper for you.
The person-centred approach, formulated by the late psychologist Carl Rogers, revolutionised the field of psychotherapy. Rogers recognised that it is the client who knows what's best. As a result, the authority previously situated in the practitioner's hands became decentralised and made for a more equalitarian therapeutic dynamic between client and counsellor. Indeed, this groundbreaking discovery set the stage for uplifting the therapeutic procedure.
After years of clinical experience and meticulous research about the therapeutic process, explicitly concerning what makes therapy such an efficacious means of mobilising healing, Rogers discerned that the client's underappreciated indigenous capacity for self-direction proved a potent force for constructive personality change. Moreover, Rogers began to appreciate this inherent forward-moving tendency as the nexus for healing and its power to be released when the practitioner possessed and related to his clients with a particular operational philosophy.
Henceforth, the therapeutic relationship rested on what's come to be known as the core conditions of empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard. The practitioner's attitudes sincerely held and emitted allow the client to explore aspects of themselves and their experience. The absence of threat permits clients to venture into emotional territory hitherto cordoned off by defences. As a result, clients can perceive themselves differently and accrue crucial insight into their individual experiences and situations. These conditions will galvanise the client's actualising resources toward living more wholeheartedly and authentically.
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