Individual Psychotherapy and Counselling
Psychotherapy and counselling both involve a collaborative relationship between an individual and their therapist to work towards understanding thoughts, feelings and behaviours in order to overcome emotional difficulties and initiate change.
Psychotherapy is a long-term treatment that involves looking into past events to gain greater insight into chronic physical and emotional problems. Psychotherapy equips individuals with healthy coping skills to respond to challenging situations and reflect on changes in life adjustments. Psychotherapy focuses on restructuring individual’s problematic presentations and the development of self-insight. People may seek psychotherapy for mood disorders, addictions, to relieve persistent anxiety and stress, adapting to major life changes, coping with trauma, or learn to manage unhealthy reactions.
Counselling involves a professional relationship that focuses on present problems and specific situations or behaviour, and is usually short term. Counselling aims to empower individuals to build action-based skills to accomplish various goals. The therapist provides support, guidance and education to help individuals navigate their own proactive solutions to current challenges. Counselling can also be a secondary process to psychotherapy. Counselling can be helpful for work or study related stress, temporary life adjustments, strengthening communication, or self-esteem difficulties.
Couples Therapy
Couples therapy recognises and resolves conflicts to improve relationships. Couples therapy helps to deepen the understanding of one another and strengthen partnerships in order to address complex issues. Couples may seek therapy for issues including life transitions, difficulty with conflict management, poor communication, trust issues, or parenting. These issues, and others, can cause constant fighting about the same or similar problem, feeling distant, feeling neglected or unloved, power imbalances or other forms of unhealthy disconnection. In couples therapy, partners are able to openly discuss difficulties while the therapist provides professional insight into relationship dynamics and how to better understand the struggles and challenges of each partner. Couples are guided so that they are able to make better relationship decisions by uncovering unhelpful beliefs, patterns and behaviours. Couples can benefit from a greater sense of emotional and physical connection, enhanced communication, respect for personal boundaries, and increased empathy. We support couples to come to a shared understanding and connect in meaningful ways to create resilient relationships.
Family Therapy
Family therapy is designed to improve the health and functioning of a family. Family therapy can be helpful for families going through difficult periods, major transitions, emotional or behavioural problems, unhelpful communication styles, or general everyday issues. Family therapy involves understanding how the family system operates as a whole in order to achieve healthy interactions within the home environment. We help families to implement communication styles that respect emotional differences between members and promote a helpful family dynamic. Each member plays an important role in the family unit and therapy gives equal priority to each member’s needs. It is NOT a goal of family therapy to target a specific ‘problem’ behaviour or member and to try to ‘fix’ this. Instead, the therapist helps the family to explore family patterns that form and enable such problems and how the family can work together as a cohesive system to solve these issues while remaining emotionally connected to each other.