Counselling, Psychotherapy, Supervision & Training, Islington, London

 

Counselling & Psychotherapy

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between Counselling and Psychotherapy?

Counselling and psychotherapy are similar in many ways. Basically, counselling helps you to manage crises in life using skills you already have whereas psychotherapy seeks to resolve more deeply rooted problems, ones that seem to have become embedded in our personality. Psychotherapy may take place over a longer period of time.

Is now the right time for me to do this?

If you always do as you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.

You may feel now is time for a change or you may feel pushed by circumstances and realise you have to change. Feeling like your current way of dealing with things is no longer working is often a prompt for people to come into therapy and get assistance in developing new personal resources.

For you to change, the timing has to be right, you have to become 'ready, willing and able' and much of therapy can be about preparing you for those moments when this can occur.

Why have counselling and therapy?

I'd rather light a candle than curse the darkness.

There is much shame in our society about being in emotional distress. Simply wanting therapy must mean there is something "wrong" with you. But are you then responsible if you don't feel okay about yourself? After all, you cant control the fact that you feel bad; cant form happy relationships; cant stop worrying unnecessarily, and so on. Or can you? At first this can seem difficult to grasp, insulting even, that somehow "I create my own pain". The idea of therapy is to discover how you do this and make clear choices about how you live your life and who you spend it with. There may be pain involved in making changes, but it will be the pain that arises from facing life as it is, not through the distortion of outdated beliefs.

We can also decide to change nothing in our lives apart from how we feel about them, as in 'I wont leave him, but I wont be bitter about staying now', is as much a personal change as filing for divorce.

What is humanistic therapy?

The basic tenets of humanistic philosophy are:

  • Everyone has essential worth

  • People are neither good nor bad- we have the potential for both

  • We all have the capacity to choose

  • People are responsible for themselves

  • People have the power to change and grow

  • The truth about people is diverse/multifaceted

What is Transactional Analysis?

T.A. is a way of understanding yourself and others and was developed by Eric Berne. As a tool it can help shift the balance of power in relationships and make sense of repeating patterns in life, the difficult places we return to. You can use it to discover the roots of current problems in the past and find ways to change old patterns and emotional habits.

What is Gestalt therapy?

This helps increase your awareness of 'the here and now'. Change is encouraged by heightening your sense of HOW you do things, and directing you creatively to try alternative ways of being.

 
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