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facing life as it is, not through the distortion of outdated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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