Counselling and Psychotherapy
Counselling and Psychotherapy are examples of talking therapies and are often used interchangeably. Both provide people with a way of dealing with change psychologically through a confidential, non-judgemental, nurturing relationship with a professional in a safe environment enabling you to become more fully yourself.
Counselling is usually brief therapy that focuses on current specific issues enabling change in behaviour patterns. Psychotherapy offers longer term treatment providing the opportunity to explore feelings, thought processes, ways of seeing and being in the world. By drawing on insight from past emotional experiences it helps increase emotional awareness and regulation, to resolve deep rooted problems.
Solution-based Brief Therapy
While treatment needs to be allowed to take as long as it takes and not be limited to a finite number of sessions there are occasions where Solution-Focused Brief Therapy is appropriate.
EDMR
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy makes use of bi-lateral stimulation of the brain. It is used to heal people from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder resulting from traumatic events such as rape, sexual abuse, road traffic accidents and combat. It can also help people who are experiencing distress following upsetting events, such as divorce, life transitions, grief and anxiety often in a much-reduced time frame compared with conventional talking therapies.
Couples/Mediation
I inspire couples to grow into conscious relationship by developing each partners’ awareness of the unconscious forces that draw us together, and the defences we erect as we seek to restore connection between the lost, denied and disowned parts of ourselves through another. Paradoxically these “protections” become barriers to the very intimacy with another that, as human beings, we crave. I encourage a less idealised and more realistic view of the other through recognition that we all have both weaknesses and strengths. None of us is perfect. Partners begin to see each other as they are without all the encumbrances of unconscious projections. By helping partners hear each other and risk becoming vulnerable and expressing their needs before one another I encourage them to develop compassion and empathy for each other so that hurtful behaviour is replaced by nurture.
Supervision
As well as providing the normative, formative and restorative aspects of clinical supervision to counsellors and psychotherapists I offer supervision to others involved in professional caring who carry the emotional load of others, for example pastors, ministers, pastoral carers, nurses, doctors, care workers, teachers, politicians and employers. To put it another way I provide care for the carer. Why wait for crisis to occur when pro-active self- care can prevent it?
Spiritual Accompaniment
The ministry of spiritual accompaniment is a sacred relationship in which one person helps another to listen to the voice of God within their heart and in their life and to respond with generosity and freedom. The purpose is to enable the one being accompanied to focus on their relationship with God and so enable their personal sense of vocation to grow and to be better lived out through the empowering work of the Holy Spirit.
This is not just a private spirituality, but one lived out in relationship to local and faith communities, creation, and the world. Spiritual accompanying seeks to enable the person being accompanied to reflect on the dynamic interaction between their experiences of prayer and life, theology, and spirituality.
Focus of the Relationship
My focus as accompanier is primarily on the inner life of you, the one I am accompanying. Attention to this is in the context of your experience of life and spiritual activities rather than as your moral guardian or confessor.
As accompanier I will seek to:
- Listen discerningly to what you share
- Be open to the Holy Spirit’s forming and guiding for the sake of God’s greater purposes
- Respond in ways that are conducive to the discernment of God in your life of the person being accompanied
- Offer insights and perspectives intended to be helpful to you as the person being accompanied in your communication and response to God and in you living this out in your life.
Nature of the Relationship
The relationship is based upon trust and mutual respect within common awareness we are both within the gracious love of God.
Common and significant areas of exploration in the relationship are likely to include:
- Personal experience and inner (emotional and spiritual) reactions to that experience
- Discerned reflection on that experience, seeking to enable growing discernment of the movements and leading of God’s Spirit in your life
- The practice of prayer and the ongoing development of spiritual life, sources of further insights and perspectives, other ways in which your journey might be explored and supported.
I am accountable to the Wilshire and Dorset Spiritual Accompaniment Network and subscribe to their Good Practice Guidelines.