What is Counselling/Psychotherapy?

Both counselling and psychotherapy involve a talk-based, relational engagement between client and therapist in support of the client's mental health and overall wellbeing, and the two terms are often used interchangeably. Where they tend to differ is in depth and intention. Many forms of counselling are primarily supportive in nature, offering the genuine and important benefits of an attentive, empathic presence: someone who listens well, helps a person feel more hopeful, and supports them to face what they are carrying with more steadiness. Psychotherapy tends to go further, working with a client to create significant internal changes in how they feel, how they relate to others, and how they understand themselves, including parts of their experience that have not yet been fully seen or integrated. In practice, most people doing deeper psychotherapeutic work also receive the supportive elements of counselling along the way, because the two are not mutually exclusive so much as they occupy different depths of the same work.

My approach is to meet clients where they are, whether they are looking for the steadying benefits of a supportive, empathic ear, or to go deeper and create more lasting change, resolving the underlying drivers of anxiety, working through the lasting effects of traumatic experience, or finding a way through depression that has not shifted despite their best efforts.

The obstacles that tend to stand between people and the lives they want usually live at one or more of four levels: thinking, feeling, behaviour, and relationship. Thoughts can become fixed patterns, lenses of negative assumption, fearful anticipation, or harsh self-appraisal, that contribute to anxiety, depression, and relational difficulty, and that are especially distressing when they feel irrational or outside of a person's control. By understanding how these patterns formed and what purpose they once served, people can develop a greater sense of choice in how they respond to their own minds. Emotions and the physical sensations that accompany them are not obstacles to be managed but vital sources of information, about safety and threat, about what we need, about how to stay in honest relationship with others, yet many people struggle to tolerate, understand, or give voice to their feelings, and much of my work focuses on exactly this. Behaviour, too, can become a source of distress, when we find ourselves acting in ways we wish we would not, or when our actions create difficulty in our relationships that we do not know how to resolve; the work here is about finding more harmony between what a person values and how they actually live. And finally, relationships: they are among the most meaningful dimensions of a human life and also among the most reliable sources of pain, and it is often relational difficulty that brings people to therapy in the first place, because difficulties at the levels of thought, feeling, and behaviour tend to manifest most visibly in how we are with the people we care about.

I believe every client brings their whole self to the work, and so each of these dimensions can become the focus at any given time, depending on what a person is struggling with and what they are hoping to change. In addition to these more universal concerns, many people carry the lasting effects of significant traumatic experiences, particularly those that took place early in life or involved the people they depended on most. I am trained in trauma-informed approaches and in specific modalities for working directly with trauma, and I bring that training to bear in support of clients who are working to move through and integrate what has been most difficult.