My work
I work in different ways depending on what you need.
You can choose between counselling, trauma therapy, Mindfulness courses and workshops on reducing anxiety. I am an accredited and registered member of the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists (BACP) and adhere to their code of ethics.
What is Counselling?
Counselling is another word for talking therapy. It is about your journey towards yourself. It is about finding ways of enhancing your experience of life, giving you the power to make the choices that are right for you and to heal what might need to be healed from past experiences. This can be done in many ways.
The way I work is called integrative. My core practice is Person Centred and I have added many other ways of working to enhance my ability to meet your needs. Person Centred means that my main focus as a counsellor is on creating a safe environment for you to enable you to look at the issues that brought you here. I will use my expertise to support you and bring in whatever tools I think will be helpful to enable your process. I am passionate about empowering you to become who you want to be.
We will decide in the initial session which approach is most suitable. However, if I believe that a different approach might be more helpful, I will suggest changing at any of the following sessions. Every six session we will review the work we are doing.
What is Trauma Therapy?
Like counselling, trauma therapy can be done in many different ways. The techniques I use are based on brain therapy and somatic processing. I use two methods that are very much interlinked. One is called Brainspotting, the other is called the Comprehensive Resource Model (CRM).
Brainspotting is a relatively new type of psychotherapy designed to help people access, process, and overcome trauma, negative emotions, and pain, including psychologically-induced physical pain. It was developed by David Grand out of EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing therapy).
Although Brainspotting is primarily used in trauma therapy, it also helps people with recovering from injuries and health problems, developing motivation or confidence, overcoming attention problems, stress, addiction and other negative emotions. It can also help with enhancing your performance levels. Many everyday psychological problems, such as anger, procrastination, and anxiety can be successfully dissolved using Brainspotting.
During Brainspotting therapists aim to help people position their eyes in a way that enables them to target the sources of negative emotions. The assumption is that where people look is connected with how they feel. By focusing the eyes on a spot that is linked to the experience and by simultaneously staying in touch with the felt sense of the experience in the body people enable the brain to reprocess and heal. There is some evidence that Brainspotting works primarily on the limbic system. The limbic system is a part of our brain that plays a role in emotion, long-term memory, cognition, motivation, impulse control and several other psychological factors that can affect wellbeing. This means that instead of working with your thoughts and beliefs, which most talking therapies do, this method works with older parts of your brain and your nervous system that have been affected by past events. It targets the root cause of the problem rather than the symptoms and therefore causes faster changes and more thorough healing to occur.
If you want to learn more about this watch this youtube video where David Grand is talking about Brainspotting.
The Comprehensive Resource Model (CRM) has been developed out of Brainspotting by Lisa Schwarz. It uses the same approach but Lisa has added a lot more supportive techniques to ensure that people can safely go into their issues. Because Brainspotting is such a powerful tool, it has become apparent that for some people, especially those with issues reaching back to childhood and with complex trauma, it is safer to use CRM rather than Brainspotting.
Both methods provide a faster and more effective way of working with your issues than the usual talking therapies.
If you want to understand more about the Comprehensive Resource Model, here is a link to Lisa Schwarz website.