About Counselling, Psychotherapy & EMDR
What is counselling and psychotherapy?Counselling and psychotherapy are about providing a safe, compassionate and confidential space in which you can explore the issues and inner conflicts that affect your life. Through coming to understand the origins of your difficulties and developing a more empathic relationship with yourself you can grow to face your life with greater confidence, fulfillment and authenticity.
What is the difference between counselling and Psychotherapy?
Counselling is normally short term with a specific goal or single focus. Psychotherapy explores issues in greater depth and requires a commitment to longer term work.
What Conditions Can it Help?
For all of us there are times when we experience difficulties, problems and challenges in life which may be helped with counselling or psychotherapy.
- Depression
- Anxiety, panic attacks and phobias
- Loss and bereavement
- Low self esteem
- Stress
- Relationships
- Sexual problems
- Feeling isolated or rejected
- Traumatic experiences both past and present
- Coping with crisis or change
- Lack of purpose, direction and meaning in life
Counselling isn't about offering advice but about listening and helping people to think through their experiences with the aim of finding a better way to deal with difficulties in their lives. Longer term psychotherapy allows you to explore and gain an awareness of patterns from the past and to see how they impact on your life now. Optimal mental health includes making sense of the suffering and conflict that we face in our daily lives. As human beings we are in a continuous process of growth and change and psychotherapy offers us the opportunity to challenge our current ways of being and our assumptions about who we are and who we may yet become.
What is EMDR?
EMDR is an acronym for Eye Movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing. It is a powerful psychological treatment method that aims to help clients remove negative associations and impulses with past and present experiences. EMDR is combined with other psychotherapeutic techniques in helping clients identify negative experiences, distorted thinking and beliefs. It then uses bi-lateral stimulation to help the client to process these traumatic experiences or distorted beliefs and move to a more realistic and comfortable view of themselves or the world. Therapists use eye movements, left right tapping or left right sounds to create the bilateral stimulation of the brain.
