Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a more directive form of therapy that helps you manage problems by identifying and modifying unhelpful thoughts, feelings and behaviours. This approach is particularly effective with issues such as stress, depression, low self-esteem, anxiety and panic.
CBT can help you improve the way you think and feel by challenging negative patterns of thinking or behaviour. It is based on 2 principles:
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Our thoughts/beliefs are connected to our behaviours, feelings and physical experiences and to the events in our lives.
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How we perceive an event affects our emotional, behavioural and physiological responses to that event.
Although CBT helps resolve current issues, it also explores how past experiences can affect how you experience the world now. You will learn to look at your thoughts and beliefs and to understand the link to your behaviours, mood and physical reactions. You will consider how problems are maintained through unhelpful behaviours, thinking distortions, negative emotional states, physical symptoms and life events.
CBT is a collaborative process which involves you taking an active part in therapy and sometimes includes “homework” between sessions such as completing a thought diary or engaging in a task to test rules and assumptions that might be maintaining a problem.
Using this approach, I work with you to help you resolve your issues in a safe, empathic environment. Our focus is on finding solutions that work for you, so that you can become your own therapist by applying new skills and techniques to old patterns of thinking and behaving and consequently improve your wellbeing in life.
Person-Centred Therapy
Person-Centred Therapy is a non-directive approach which is particularly helpful when exploring issues such as loss, bereavement, loneliness or identity.
You may find this type of therapy more appropriate if you are looking for an environment in which you feel you can encounter yourself and become more intimate with your own thoughts, feelings and meanings.
This type of approach focuses on the core conditions of unconditional positive regard, congruence and empathy being in place and the quality of the therapeutic relationship, to ensure you feel listened to and accepted.
Such a therapeutic relationship can support you to find fulfilment of your personal potential through your innate self-actualising tendency; your in-built tendency to ‘right yourself’ and realise your true potential.
As your counsellor, I will ask questions which lead you to gain insight into your feelings, your blind spots, your needs and your hopes. I offer a safe, supportive and non-judgemental space to enable you to make your own decisions, manage difficulties and live a more authentic and satisfying life.
