influences on counselling

The following beliefs say a little about me and my perspective. The therapeutic relationship is built on a combination of your willingness to address the things in your life that you want to change, and my perspective, feedback and presence that I share with you. The therapeutic relationship offers a space to develop your self-awareness and connection to yourself and others by experimenting with different ways of being, and allowing your true self to emerge.

To Live Life As it Is.

Naturally we want things to be different especially when we are in pain, or know that we are living life at half-mast. However, so often people come to counseling with a perfectionist drive that is trying to avoid the unpleasant or imperfect in life. Learning to live with life's ups and downs is not easy. I have come to understand that the more we try and hold on to the pleasant experiences the harder it is to also let go of the unpleasant. We need to learn to be more at ease with all experiences and then we can move through them quicker. In this way, when we can live with life as it is, the more it will change. From this perspective I think experiences such as despair, sadness, and grief are a natural part of life. We live in a culture that is all too ready to medicate us out of these experiences and so rob us of the wisdom that can come from going through these difficult times. I believe that the easier we are with our disappointments the greater our joy can be.

Say What You Mean and Mean What you Say

To speak the truth is hard in a culture that encourages us to lie. We tend to lie based on our fear of others reactions, or that we are going to hurt them. We become focused on pleasing others to avoid conflict. The more we live our life from this standpoint the more we become disconnected from ourselves. Our connections with others then become empty because we are only allowing a small part of who we are to be experienced. To live authentically means that our actions match our words and our hearts, and in doing so we become trustworthy.

There is no right and wrong only perspectives.

This is important in the counseling process. You are going to have many experiences of situations in your life and of other people, and it is important to be able to explore your reactions and feelings to them in counseling. However, our reactions are largely coming from the way we see things, and each of us have very different perspectives on things, in other words our perspective is not the truth about a situation. An example of this is that we can experience the world as a mainly unsafe place, with moments of safety, or a mainly safe place with moments of danger. These are two different perspectives, the world carries on as it is but each perspective will affect the way we experience the world. In each of these positions we are experiencing our past, conclusions about others and ourselves, emotional responses and self-protections. So as we explore our reactions we can develop a lot of awareness of ourselves that will inform the changes we want to make in our life. This type of self-exploration is the core of the counseling process.

We can only Experience the Present Moment

Through awareness we gain more information that enables us to make decisions, take action and express ourselves. Awareness is also more than thinking about why we do things but more to do with how we do things, and what we are experiencing. In counseling I will bring your attention to your experience in this way to keep focusing on the here and now. When we think about the past or the future, and most of our energy is taken up in this way, we end up missing out on life because this energy becomes bogged down with what we could have done and what we should do, instead of just being here.

I believe it is preferable to live our life as present centered as possible; I want to experience life, not just think about it. Awareness, therefore, is crucial to living in the present. There are lots of things that get in the way of us living in the present, fears, past experiences, dissociation from ourselves and the world. So in counseling it is important to address these processes so we can keep moving towards being fully and truthfully here.

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