WHAT IS COUNSELLING?

Sometimes life can be really hard, causing us to become upset and sometimes we don’t know why. Counselling or Psychotherapy can be beneficial; we offer a safe and confidential place for people to share what’s happening to them where feelings of stupidity, shame, anger or guilt can be explored. The goal or aim of therapy is to enable people to make changes, which are enhancing and acceptable to the client.

It could be something recent that affects us, for instance, an argument may impact our relationships more deeply than we thought it might, we may lose someone we love, develop anxiety or panic attacks, feel low in our mood. We may not feel like eating or our sleeping patterns may change, we could become tearful and not know why. Stress may affect us, either at work or with the demands of family life. Rob Canon may integrate Solution Focussed Counselling into his Person-Centred way of working, and Sue Canon may use her training in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with these issues, amongst others, which would be suitable for counselling because they have started to affect you recently.

The Jesuits have a saying that we both agree has meaning; Give me the boy until he’s seven and I’ll give you the man. This implies that these are the formative years of our lives when we learn how to be in the world. Our characters and personalities are formed in relationship with our parents or primary carers. If we had good, loving supportive relationships with them our self esteem and self worth will be good and we will see the world as a safe, positive place to be. If our parenting was indifferent, negative or abusive we can grow up feeling insecure, believing that it’s our fault. Psychotherapy looks at long standing difficulties such as; repetitive damaging relationships, personality styles, low self-esteem and self-worth, amongst other issues, and how we deal with them and the impact this has on our adult lives. We would regard psychotherapy as an open-ended commitment where both the therapist and the client would work together for a longer period of time to resolve the client’s issues.

We believe there is a difference between short term focussed counselling for problems with a recent onset, and psychotherapy for how our histories affect us today.