We all encounter difficult times and situations in our lives.  Most of the time, we have the personal resources and support that allow us to deal with life's challenges.  There are times, however, when a helping hand can make all the difference.  Counselling provides you with an opportunity to explore whatever is standing in the way of your well-being and happiness.  Counselling is not about judging, nor is it about advice.  It is about helping you to understand yourself and using this awareness to make effective changes in your life.

Counselling provides a safe, accepting and supportive environment for you to explore what drives you, what gets in your way, what scares you and what motivates you.  Bringing this knowledge into awareness allows you to better understand your responses to situations, giving you the opportunity to make choices about how to deal with them.  As your awareness of self develops, you become better able to manage situations and feelings you previously found difficult.

Speaking in confidence to someone who has no previous knowledge of you and has no desire to judge you means that you can talk about any aspect of your life, knowing you will be listened to and supported.

It depends on what you want to do.  Sometimes just a couple of sessions will help you find the clarity you are looking for over a specific issue.  In many cases, 5-10 sessions are enough to allow you to gain a perspective that enables you to deal with whatever is troubling you.  Problems that are deeper-rooted will require more work.  How much work you want to do is entirely up to you and the choice whether to continue always rests with you.  If you stop counselling and decide to return later on, you will always be welcomed back.

The terms counselling and psychotherapy are often used interchangeably but there is a distinction.  Counselling generally involves relatively short-term work (weeks or months) that typically - but not exclusively - addresses more specific issues or behaviours.  Psychotherapy is associated with longer-term work that seeks to explore how we relate to the world and others, which has its roots in early experiences.  Early experiences underlie the beliefs we hold about ourselves and the world.

In general, counselling is based on the premise that the way you manage relationships and situations in your life has its roots in your early life experiences.  Many of the lessons learned are so deeply rooted that they become embedded in our unconscious minds.  When this happens, we are liable to react to situations, unaware that we are replaying outdated strategies that are no longer relevant to us in our adult world.

As you work with a counsellor, different aspects of your feelings and the strategies you use to cope with them will come to light.  They can then be brought into consciousness and explored in the safety of the counselling relationship, which offers empathy and unconditional acceptance.  Conscious knowledge offers us choices.