How I Work
My approach to counselling is focused on creating an environment that helps you to feel safe to explore personal issues that may be troubling you. As a Humanistic practitioner, I am committed to being non-judgmental, respectful and honest with my clients. My genuinely warm and gentle approach helps to ease anxieties you may have about counselling and to build effective therapeutivc relationships. I believe in human uniqueness and our fundamental innocence; a holistic need to balance intellect, spirit, emotions and the body; individual autonomy and responsibility; and the importance of learning to accept our limitations and thrive regardless. I also aim to work within a framework that both recognizes and values human differences, whether of ethnicity, sexual orientation and identity, religious and spiritual belief, culture, class, age or levels of ability/disability. Being an Integrative Counsellor also helps me to adjust my approach to the individual needs of most clients, as I can utilize a wide range of theoretical approaches and incorporate also some of the latest research findings in Neuroscience.
My theoretical approach to counselling is Humanistic Integrative. This type of counselling recognises that different clients have different needs and believes that no one single approach is sufficient. Humanistic Integrative Counselling is inspired by a range of theories, which includes the contributions of the Humanistic, Existential, Psychodynamic and Transpersonal approaches. The integration of these models aims toward understanding your internal world and your experiences within the wider family and social/cultural context and to use approaches that suit best your needs and preferences. Humanistic Integrative Counselling is also a Holistic approach that considers the whole person: Mind, Body and Spirit.
Humanistic psychology emphasises the uniqueness of every human being, and the growth and development of the individual as the result of experience allied with understanding. Humanistic practitioners are therefore concerned with helping their clients realise their own unique potential. The therapist’s positive and supportive attitude communicates understanding, trust and acceptance to the client, who is encouraged to see themselves in a more balanced and accepting way. Trusting our judgments and focusing on our unique strength while accepting our limitations can be very empowering to clients, especially people struggling with lack of confidence, motivation and assertiveness or difficulties around identity and self-acceptance.
Existential approaches focus on some universally shared aspects of our existence as human beings. We all struggle at times to accept the limitations this places upon us, like accepting illness, aging and our mortality. We can also struggle from a sense of isolation, no matter how close we are to others, as some of our internal experiences we are unable to share with them. Other concerns can relate to our sense of freedom and responsibility to others and ourselves, which often create contradicting demands upon us. We can also struggle with a sense of meaningless to our life, which can happen even if everything in our life seems fine on the surface. My awareness and sensitivity to these existential concerns has been very supportive to many of my clients who faced similar challenges.
Psychodynamic theory gives emphasis to the recurring patterns we can create in our relationships based on our past experiences. Some habitual ways of relating are formed in response to our childhood environment. Originally, this helped us coping with our family, but in our adult life this also can become very limiting when relating to others. You may be aware yourself of some of these negative patterns, like never talking about problems to others, because of your fear to appear vulnerable. At other times you are just aware of recurring problems, but don’t know why it keeps happening to you. Counselling can help you to understand how some of your patterns of behaviour may contribute to your difficulties. A good therapeutic relationship with your counsellor also can create a safe environment for you to try out new ways of relating, like taking the risk of talking openly with someone you can trust.
Transpersonal perspective is often useful when our concerns relate to how we see our connection to the world around us and whether we can find some kind of purpose to our lives and an order to the universe that our existence can fit into. Whether we are religious or not, we can be interested in exploring issues that are more to do with our spiritual concerns than with issues of an everyday practical nature. An open and non-judgmental atmosphere and sensitivity towards these issues can help clients to explore their similar concerns in a meaningful way. Using creative and holistic methods, like working with dreams, visualization, metaphors or meditation techniques can also help you to access your inner resources and intuition for facilitating your healing process.
Neuroscience has been through a great revolution in the past decade, as we finally have the instruments needed to examine closer the working of the human brain and nervous system and connections between the Body and Mind. Research in this field provided much needed scientific data that underpins many old theories about healing and personal growth, like the healing potential of relationships, meditation or exploring our dreams. Research also opened up some exciting new perspectives in this field, like discovering innate differences in temperament between people with Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) - also known as Highly Sensitive People (HSP) - and the non-sensitive majority. My counselling work has been influenced by these research findings and I often share relevant information with clients that may aid their recovery and well-being.