Your Counselling Sessions

Relationships can feel complicated.

Relationships with controlling people have long-lasting effects on the mind, body, and soul. Controlling behaviours cause trauma. The cause of the trauma isn’t limited to controlling physical or sexually abusive behaviour. Controlling practices such as gaslighting and manipulation are equally as damaging, and usually more challenging to spot.

Our adult relationships can also bring to the surface any underlying trauma about which you are unaware.  This could be from insensitive or neglectful parenting, loss or another traumatic childhood experience.

Counselling sessions can help.

All in all, the counselling sessions with me are about healing the trauma, understanding your symptoms, and reclaiming your life.

In the counselling sessions, you will, in your own time, tell your story, and I will listen.

Together we will:

• Take stock of where you are now.
• Make sense of your relationship and understand the unconscious bond between you and your partner.
• Identify any trauma.
• Identify trauma-related symptoms, e.g., depression, anxiety, physical illness, addiction, or eating disorders.
• Reconnect with your feelings and emotions, seeing them as a source of inner wisdom and information.
• Make contact and befriend your inner child – old stories are often triggered by current ones.
• Develop tools to heal the trauma.
• Because shame is primary in controlling relationships, compassionately integrate the aspects of you that you always felt were hard to understand.
• Grieve.
• Develop new tools for living, e.g. mindfulness, journalling, self-compassion, non-violent communication skills, a robust but loving inner parent to provide support to the younger parts of yourself.

As a result, the skills you will learn in your counselling sessions will help you to make meaningful, long-lasting changes and set you up for living the life you want and deserve. In essence, you will rediscover your autonomy and confidence so you can decide what you want to do next. 

Importantly, you will guide the counselling sessions in a way that feels right for you. I will provide insight, understanding, and possibly new perspectives to help you cope with overwhelming thoughts or emotions.

Counselling Isn’t The Easy Option But Perhaps The Most Worthwhile.

I’m not going to lie. Healing from relationship trauma and abuse isn’t a quick fix.

When the control is particularly subtle, many women do not quickly realise the abuse. So in the same way that coercive control takes time to take hold in your life, it takes time and patience to unravel.

Counselling is a commitment and investment in yourself.

Perhaps for the first time in your life, you’ll begin to feel positive about what the future holds and confident that you’ll be able to handle the things that life inevitably throws up along the way.

A Little About What Your Counselling Sessions Look Like

As a psychosynthesis trained counsellor and couple therapist, I understand the complexity of relationships.  I recognise healthy relationships and the symptoms of unhealthy ones. 

Integrative Psychosynthesis draws on several approaches including Psychodynamic, Gestalt, Archetypal and Jungian psychology. And these different ways of working help you to look at your past, present and future in a flexible approach which best meets your need and provide the right support for you.  

Drawings, dreams, meditation, visualisation, poetry, music and story-telling are all profound ways of reconnecting with unconscious parts of you.

With consciousness comes awareness, and with increased self-awareness comes choice. When you make fully conscious and active choices, you can better handle the dilemmas and challenges that your relationship and life bring. 

While exploring the past is essential, I also recognise that you have a transpersonal essence; that there is something greater than your ordinary self. The counselling sessions will help you identify and express that essence or self.  

Your sessions with me will embrace all that you are; light and shadow, joy and pain and all the different shades of grey in between.

Sometimes it is in your deepest and darkest moments that we find the most potential.