What is therapy?
Therapy is a safe, confidential and non-judgemental space where you can open up about your issues, concerns and worries. As a therapeutic counsellor, I will allow you the space to explore your thoughts, feelings and behaviours so you can begin to understand yourself and others, and importantly, how you react to situations and other people.
What is the difference between counselling and psychotherapy?
Throughout this site, I refer to psychotherapy as therapy for short, and at times may use it interchangeably with counselling. In the UK, the terms do overlap. The most common distinction made is that counsellors are more solution focused and work shorter term, whereas psychotherapists / therapists work longer term and tend to go 'deeper' with the work.
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I would describe myself currently as a therapeutic counsellor, as I like to work with more complex presentations, and explore the past to understand the reasons for why we behave as we do. However, I really enjoy the goal-orientated, shorter term work as well, and believe in a short number of sessions we can sometimes see big change.
What do you mean by Transactional Analysis therapy?
I studied Transactional Analysis (TA) as my core modality as it was something that I found made sense to me and I could relate easily to.
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The core philosophy of TA is that
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People are OK.
​​Everyone has worth and is important, value and dignity. I may not like, agree with or condone your behaviours, but I accept you as you are.
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Everyone has the capacity to think.
Almost everyone has the ability to make decisions about what they want in life. Each individual must live with the consequences of what they decide...​
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People decide their own destiny, and these decisions can be changed.
...however we can make different decisions ​and change how we think about things. This is up to the individual themselves.
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What about Integrative therapy?
As well as studying TA, I have studied (and continue to study) a number of other modalities. Integrative therapy is just this - exploring different schools of thought so that I have a wider understanding of therpeatutic techniques and ideas to be able to understand my clients and be able to tailor my work to them and their needs.
