My experience suggests you are looking for either answers or solutions.  Counselling provides a method of identifying and actioning these.  From low self esteem or confidence to feelings of depression, fear and despair, counselling can help you.

Life’s challenges can have a very negative effect on the way we live and our behaviour.  They lower our mood, reduce our energy and often leave us feeling stuck.  Simple everyday events in life seem harder to manage while you carry the weight of unresolved difficulties.  Talking confidentially with a professionally trained therapist will begin to make positive changes to your sense of wellbeing.  A therapist will help you to focus on your strengths and guide you towards finding the most suitable way for you to resolve difficulties.

Sometimes a deep sense of dissatisfaction without any immediate crisis will affect our emotions.  Much of our mind is outside conscious awareness and is shaped by our experiences throughout life, including events in our early childhood.  Counselling and Psychotherapy can help you to explore those experiences and the way they affect your life today.  As we gain awareness of unconscious thoughts, feelings and behaviours a process of change occurs improving our mental health and feeling of wellbeing.

Counselling is becoming increasing popular as people begin to realise that there is no longer any need to live with emotional distress.

Whether struggling with depression, suffering the debilitating effects of fear, anxiety and stress, coming to terms with a life changing event or of feeling lost in your life, people are now more aware that there are times when we All need support.

Talking confidentially and receiving support from a professionally trained therapist can help you to work through your difficulty and move on with your life.

Counselling provides a working relationship in which you are helped to explore and manage what is happening in your life.  It is tailored to your personal need which means that your counsellor will take account of your individual personality and how it works in your world alongside the difficulties you want to address and the outcomes that you wish to achieve.  Counselling is not about impressing upon you a set of rules, giving advice or telling you what to do, nor is it about solving your problems for you, it’s about working alongside you to help clarify your thoughts, making clear your experiences and feelings and how these may be affecting your current situation, then helping you to find the best means for you to move forward.

Delivered in a strictly confidential, non-judgemental, supportive environment counselling can help you to share your concerns.  You many be surprised at what you have held inside for a long long time and this emotional unloading provides you with mind space allowing for increased insight and personal awareness.  Freeing your creativity and thought processes can help you to find solutions to your problems.

Counselling is not only a place to resolve difficulties it also provides space in which you can grow and develop.  The overall aim of counselling is to promote emotional and psychological balance and wellbeing providing you the opportunity to work towards a more satisfying and pleasurable experience of life.

People enter counselling for a variety of reasons, including relationship difficulties, work related stress, depression, anxiety, bereavement grief and other forms of loss, physical emotional and sexual abuse, phobias, obsessive compulsions, panic disorders, drug and alcohol difficulties, eating disorders, coping with poor health or that of a loved one, dealing with past problems, loss of confidence and low self esteem, anger management, self-harm, post-traumatic stress, major change or big life decisions, feeling stuck in many different ways, bullying and behavioural problems whether yours or others.

For some there is a sense of relief in being able to discuss their difficulties openly with someone they can trust and who is impartial; taking the first step to address their problem.  Others find benefit from just being heard, understood and honestly and genuinely respected in a safe non-judgemental relationship, which is sufficient reason on its own to enter counselling.

For whatever reason you are seeking the support of counselling, finding the right therapist for you is an important part of your healing process.  There are many styles of working, or orientations.  Most therapists continuing to expand their knowledge use a mix of several.

You can find further information about counselling from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.