Therapy can help you when:
- You get referral from your GP for counselling/talking therapies but waiting list is too long and you feel you want to try private help;
- You don’t feel confident enough to have therapy in English language and would like to talk to someone who is your native speaker about what is troubling you;
- You experience low mood or depression;
- You feel anxious, tense or nervous without any particular reason;
- You are/live in permanent stress that has an impact on your everyday life;
- You experienced some traumatic events;
- You experience suicidal thoughts or thoughts of life not worth leaving;
- You experienced some difficult life event, such as bereavement, a relationship breakdown or work-related stress;
- Your quality of life is not what you expect;
- You find difficult to create satisfying relationship with your partner or with other people;
- You deal with addiction;
- Your experience some difficulties in your family such as abuse or addiction of parent or partner;
- You experience low self-esteem,
- Or just simply for your own development and self-growth.
“We want to provide a setting in which past failures can be re-experienced so that our clients are able to work through their feelings about these failures. This process is facilitated by an understanding of how past events are connected both with client’s present life and with the specific relationship that is made with therapist. Moreover, through clients’ emotional experience of being accepted and understood by the therapist, ego strength is built.”
Anne Gray
Which therapy should I choose?
The term therapy covers a range of approaches and methods, from one-to-one talking session, group therapy or online session to therapies that use different techniques to help you explore your feelings and emotions such as role-paly, art or dance. Therapy then can take different forms depending on your needs, expectations and what type of therapy may be suitable.
Below you will find a list of the different types of therapy that we offer. It describes the main features of psychological therapies and clarify some commonly used professional terms.
Taking the first step in deciding to engage in therapeutic process can often be a difficult decision and you may feel anxious, confused or uncertain. It is natural to feel like that. We encourage you to contact us, and we will try to answer all your questions and doubts. You may also choose to book an initial assessment with one of our therapists to discuss your concerns and help you to decide which kind of service would be best possible choice for you.
More information about types of therapy you may find here or here:
The most common way of receiving therapy is one-to-one session, where you and your therapist are alone together in the same room. It is a joint process between a client and a therapist, that take place in planned, regular sessions which last around 50 minutes, usually on a once-weekly basis. How often you see your therapist and how many appointments you have will depend on your individual circumstances, and will be agreed between you and your therapist.
First session is dedicated for initial assessment initial assessment and generally lasts 90 min. Sometimes if your therapist thinks that you both need more time to explore what brings you to counselling, they may recommend another session to develop their understanding about your problems and difficulties.
During the process, therapist will encourage you to talk freely about what have made you seek therapy. He or she will be empathetic, responsive and nonjudgmental, encouraging you to be as open as possible. In the same time, they will remain impartial and will keep professional boundaries. They may offer information, but they won’t tell you what you should think or do.
Therapy might include talking about past and present life events, your childhood, your feelings, emotions, relationships, ways of thinking and patterns of behaviour. Your therapist will help you look at your concerns and identify the best course of action for you, which might be helping you to resolve your difficulties or to find ways of coping.
What you talk about will vary depend on what you want help with and the therapist’s approach. It’s useful to discuss what approaches a therapist offers, so you can think about what might work well for you.
To check what approach our therapist offer, check their profiles here.
Counselling and psychotherapy are umbrella terms that cover a range of talking therapies. There are several different types of therapy and therapist. It’s important to find a therapist and a way of working you’re comfortable with so you can feel at ease discussing personal and emotional issues.
To read more about different titles and types of therapy click here.
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is evidence-based, empirically supported psychotherapy best known for its effectiveness in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).
EMDR can also be brief focused treatment or part of a longer psychotherapy programme.
EMDR sessions usually last from 60 to 90 minutes. During EMDR treatment, you will remain in control, fully alert and wide-awake. This is not a form of hypnosis and you can stop the process at any time. Throughout the session, the therapist will support and facilitate your own self-healing and intervene as little as possible. Reprocessing is usually experienced as something that happens spontaneously, and new connections and insights are felt to arise quite naturally from within. As a result, most people experience EMDR as being a natural and very empowering therapy.
How EMDR works?
When a person is involved in a traumatic event, they may feel overwhelmed and it causes imbalance in their nervous system consequently creating ‘block’ or incomplete information processing. Their brain may be unable to fully process what is going on.
Subsequently, the memory of the traumatic event can be stored in the brain in isolation, unprocessed and locked into the nervous system with the original images, sounds, thoughts and feelings that were there at the time of event.
As a result the person can re-experience what they saw, heard and smelt and the full force of the distress they felt over and over again whenever the memory comes to mind. This prevents learning/healing from taking place.
dentifying the hotspots of unprocessed events is central to EMDR treatment.
Goals of EMDR are to help the brain release and reprocess the memory properly in a way that is not so intense anymore, to facilitate a distinction between remembering the experience rather than re-experiencing it, to achieve a position where remembering is not emotionally disturbing anymore and the person can think about the event without experiencing such strong feelings.
EMDR also has been used to effectively treat a wide range of mental health problems such as:
- anxiety and panic attacks,
- depression,
- stress,
- phobias,
- sleep problems,
- complicated grief,
- addictions,
- pain relief,
- phantom limb pain,
- self-esteem and performance anxiety.
More information about EMDR you will find here: www.emdrassociation.org.uk
