My approach focuses on belief that counselling and psychotherapy is a process which places emphasis upon building a trusting therapeutic relationship between counsellor and client. This can provide a secure base from which to explore your thoughts, feelings and anxieties. This will enable you to gain confidence and will enable you to manage your life more effectively.

As well as exploring present difficulties we can focus on your past to consider how previous experiences might be impacting on your current issues. Building and maintaining a trusting therapeutic relationship with you is an important part of my work as a counsellor because I want you to feel safe and supported enough to be able to talk about your innermost thoughts and feelings. I understand that it is not easy to take that first step in coming to counselling, but whatever your difficulty I strive to make you feel welcome and I listen to you with respect.

In times of difficulty and distress it can be easier to talk to somebody who is independent of family, friends or colleagues. In my role as a counsellor I am not here to tell you what to do, but to support you in drawing on your own inner resources and in finding your own way forward. In order to do this safely I offer a warm, safe, confidential and comfortable environment.

I offer a non- judgemental attitude and work at your pace, recognising the uniqueness of your individual values, belief system and cultural background. This will support you to get beyond negative patterns, to see thing differently and reconnect you to aspects of yourself.

Psychodynamic Counselling is one of the major traditions within contemporary psychotherapy. Its aim is to help us achieve insight and understanding around the reasons for our issues, and to translate this insight into a mature capacity to cope with current and future difficulties. Five key principles of the psychodynamic approach:

1. People have troubled relationships because they are repeating a destructive relationship pattern from the past.

2. The person may seek to control or hide difficult or unacceptable mental desires, memories and feelings by use of defence mechanisms, such as transference, projection, denial, repression, sublimation, splitting and projective identification.

3. It is important for helpers, including counsellors to be aware of their own feelings, fantasies and impulses in relation to the person they are helping.

4. The person’s issues can be understood as representing unresolved developmental tasks (e.g. separation from the mother/parents)

5. People have a need for secure, consistent emotional attachments.

Psychodynamic methods have been applied to understanding and treating a range of psychological issues. Its origins are found in the work of Sigmund Freud, but the approach has developed significantly over the years. The goals of psychodynamic therapy are to increase a client’s “self-awareness” and to understand the influence of past events on present behaviour.

The psychodynamic therapy assists the client in gaining insight in order to recognise their character traits, their actions, responses and behaviours to present situations. This approach enables the client to explore unresolved conflicts that arise from past relationships, which are having an effect on current relationships.