What is counselling?
Counselling is a safe space where you can be the true you, where you can be heard and understood without judgement. Counselling is a time when you can explore thoughts and feelings that may be too difficult to look at on your own. Counselling is a process helping you to understand and accept the real you.
Anxiety and Stress
Sometimes our worries can feel too much, whether it’s a sudden major crisis, or just too many everyday stresses. Having a safe place to explore and understand your anxieties can help with feelings of being stuck or helpless and give you the space to breathe, face your fears, and enable you to find a way forward.
Depression
We all feel “down” from time to time, but depression is a longer lasting, sometimes devastating condition, with feelings of hopelessness, lethargy, and difficulty in engaging with or enjoying life. Having someone who understands and supports you through depression can literally be lifesaving. Counselling can help provide the support you need to explore difficult feelings and situations and find a way from the darkness of depression back into the light.
Loneliness and Isolation
Sometimes it helps just to have someone to talk with. Feeling listened to and understood can help lift mood and provide a sense of worth and belonging. If you are alone, feelings of hopelessness, despair and a lack of human contact can lead to a reduced quality of life and even depression. Counselling can help with exploring feelings of loneliness, social isolation and difficulties in engaging with others.
Normalising and Perspective
What’s normalising? It’s taking feelings of being different or odd and putting them into context. Getting a different perspective can sometimes help with understanding what’s “normal”. Feeling like you’re the odd one out, or that you’re the only one experiencing something, can be frightening, hurtful or isolating. Counselling can help with understanding and gaining a wider perspective. Just knowing that you’re not alone and what you’re going through isn’t unusual can help reduce anxiety and provide hope.
Mental health issues
Repeated difficulties in relationships, dealing with everyday life, or other issues that seem to follow you from situation to situation may indicate more complex problems. Personality disorder, PTSD, trauma, attachment issues and other deep rooted difficulties can all be helped by counselling, but will usually require long term work for change to happen.
Support
Counselling can offer support when you most need it, when you’re feeling lost at sea and don’t know how to go on. Counselling can help with insight and perspective when you have a difficult path ahead of you, or when you’re lacking confidence or direction. Counselling can help you on your journey of self-discovery, the understanding of your behaviours and your relationships with others.