Counselling

Counselling

What is Counselling?

Counselling is a structured conversation aimed at facilitating a client's quality of life in the face of adversity. It is not a social conversation but has a specific purpose and aims to be facilitative of a person's quality of life. It aims to help a person to achieve a degree of freedom and possibility that just weren't there before.

What happens in counselling?

• Clients are encouraged to tell their story and to give voice to aspect of their experience that previously have been silenced, in their own time and own way, including the expression of feeling and emotion.

• The counsellor sets aside his or her own position on the issues brought by the client. Whatever is discussed is treated as confidential and the counsellor refrains passing on what they have discussed with the client to any other person.

• The counsellor enacts a relationship that is an expression of a set of core values: honesty, integrity, care, belief in the worth and value of clients.

• Clients are encouraged to gain a sense of personal ownership toward their mental and emotional care in the context of problems and solutions.

• They explore their accountability for their health and positive changes.

• They find safe emotional expression in a context of an impartial witness

• They explore meaning by giving words and language to uncomfortable thoughts.

• They gain an orientation to growth

Our counselling helps clients with:

• Insight into origin and development of emotional difficulties.

• Relating with others in order to be better able to form meaningful and satisfying relationships.

• Self-awareness of thoughts and feelings, or develop a more accurately sense of how self is perceived by others.

• Self-acceptance and positive sense of self.

• Self-actualization or individuation, fulfilling one's potential or integrating previously conflicting parts of self.

• A state of higher personal or spiritual awareness.

• Problem-solving.

• Psychological education to understand and control behavior more positively

• Acquisition of social and interpersonal skills, like anger management and assertiveness.

• Cognitive change of irrational beliefs or maladaptive thought patterns.

• Behavior change of maladaptive or self-destructive patterns of behavior

• Introducing systematic change to social systems, like parents, families, work teams or neighborhoods.

• Empowerment via skills, awareness or knowledge.

• Restitution and making amends.

• Generativity in the sense of caring for others; and social action that contributes to the collective good through communal engagement and community work.