Counselling - What is Counselling?

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Taking is a great way to connect with others. Talk therapy is a more traditional method of therapy. It can help clients to share their issues with a therapist and help them to make changes in their life. If talking is something that is difficult for you there are other tools we can use to help you work through your issues. 

Sometimes talking can be difficult for people and it can is easier to use arts and crafts to illustrate what is going on for you. This can include painting, drawing, clay, stones, collages, poetry, music and more. 

As children play is our first way of building relationships and connecting with others. It also helps us to express ourselves and our emotions. We use play in therapy to help adults and young people to reconnect with their inner emotional world. 

Your resources can take the form of people you have in your life, skills you have or used to have or the way you view things and these are very important aspects of counselling. We can use these in the therapy to help you build on them and ensure you have support outside the therapy room. These can include sport, religion, a family member, a good friend, a pet or even a podcast you listen to. 

Movies, podcasts, music, books and poetry can all be ways of helping us express ourselves and understand our thoughts and behaviours. We can use media in and out of the therapy room to help process thoughts and feelings. 

Mindfulness exercises such as mindful breathing and meditation can help reduce stress and anxiety. Mindfulness is like a muscle, the more you practice the better you become. It can help you to understand the link between your thoughts, emotions, behaviour and physiology. It can also help you to cultivate gratitude and compassion for yourself and others. 

Communication skills are essential for our relationships with others. They can be an important part of how people treat you. We can work together to build these skills and practice in the session before you try them out yourself. 

Homework can be a way of practising new skills and should complement the therapy. We can work together to set realistic tasks to help you achieve your goals for therapy. Homework is always set together and there is no obligation to complete it. 

In therapy we can work to explore how our emotions manifest in the body. This can be useful as sometimes you may not have the words for how you are feeling but you can notice it in the body. 

Do you have a current dilemma or difficulty that you can identify and want to overcome? Then this type of therapy might be useful for you. Solution focused therapy tends to focus on the present issues and desired outcome and less on the past. 

In therapy, sometimes it can be useful to reconnect with the younger you to help you in the present. We can work together to process unresolved issues from childhood and help you to gain more clarity.