Individual Counselling

Welcome to Counselling Hounslow and Twickenham.

Counselling is a therapeutic process which is there to support you, when you're struggling with intense emotions, relationships or a personal crisis. As an experienced counsellor, I provide you with an opportunity to give voice to your fears, anxieties and hopes for the future. You can talk to me in a safe environment, without being judged. Through counselling, you will regain a sense of clarity and understanding over your own thought processes. You will also become more responsive to your emotions and other people, by learning new behaviours.

Individual counselling focuses you alone.

You are the client. I am there to listen with compassion and empathy as you to talk through your issues. Usually, this means learning  to trust your instincts and make better choices. As such, you talk to me in a confidential setting and free to open-up, when other sources of support are too close for comfort. That is not to say that counselling replaces family and friends, but it helps to provide you with a more neutral perspective.

My aim, therefore, is to help you develop self-awareness and find your own solutions to the problems you face. Counselling however, is not about offering you advice or ready-made solutions. For this reason, I focus on building a partnership based on mutual respect and encouragement. I believe this helps you remain true to yourself. And as you progress, you learn to feel more confident about making your own decisions and what is best for you.

I understand that coming to terms with painful memories and emotions isn't easy. So I do my best to listen with empathy, but inevitably counselling involves a degree of challenge. As you open up and face your vulnerabilities, you will find yourself building on your strengths and independence.

Counselling Hounslow and Twickenham

As a counsellor, I believe that taking care of your mental health and wellbeing is essential. Your survival depends on it. In the modern world you receive medical treatment for disease, physical ailments and injury. of course, you can even replace damaged organs with reconstructive surgery, but the mind remains a mystery. This is why I use scientific research as the basis of my therapy. At Counselling In Hounslow, I will provide an opportunity for:

• promoting self-awareness and wellbeing
• making sense of negative thoughts and emotions
• changing destructive impulses and harmful behaviour
• helping you choose the most appropriate course of action
• the underlying reasons behind relationship breakdown

I offer individual counselling at £75

What Qualities Should You Look For in Your Relationship with a Counsellor?

• a relationship based on mutual respect                                                a feeling of trust, safety and rapport
• being understood and accepted                                                             a willingness to collaborate and negotiate
• empathy and compassion                                                                        a sense you are making progress
• believing you can work together with your counsellor                        your counsellor seems grounded and robust
• your counsellor belongs to a professional body                                   a well-qualified counsellor (Master's Degree)

According to recent research in neuroscience the brain is a constantly evolving. As a result, your brain cells are always renewing themselves. This means you always have a chance to learn a way forward. The human mind is a beautiful thing. It's able to bring you moments of joy and inspiration, but it's also fragile. Sometimes the mind is subject to emotional crisis and distress. At other times, it simply doesn’t function, creating unhappiness and pain.

Deep inside the structures of your brain, events of the mind go unnoticed. You are only aware of these events through your sensory perceptions, memories and conscious awareness. So the brain is a region of profound mystery where intense feelings, language and ideas are generated. And yet how well do we look after it?

My Personal Approach to Counselling

I offer counselling in Hounslow and Twickenham areas to help you to gain a better understanding of your difficulties and distress. During counselling, I will encourage you to choose better ways of coping and adapting to change. This means we will explore your most recent experiences and traumas, as well as your unconscious patterns of behaviour and childhood relationships.

I believe the counselling process must have continuity, because your commitment is vital to the learning process. You cannot learn at any depth without weekly sessions. So depending on your concerns, counselling may involve brief or long-term work together. Moreover, we need time to explore your issues. I find that the structure and continuity of counselling are essential for you to explore your thoughts and emotions safely.

I ensure that every session at Counselling in Hounslow is different. This is because I know your challenges are unique to you. As an experienced counsellor, I will help you to explore your feelings and experiences in a structured way. Additionally, I can also offer mindfulness as part of the work we do together. I am also open to the idea of exploring your imagination, inspiration, and dreams.

What Kind of Counselling Do I Offer?

Counselling is not a cure. It is a well-researched process designed to help you gain self-awareness. I am a qualified psychotherapist (Master’s degree, UKCP) and sometimes I work with a broader range of issues at more depth. I spent many years training as a psychotherapist, which improves the quality of the relationship I provide. As an experienced psychotherapist with the UKCP, I have trained to master’s degree level. I practice psychotherapy using a blend of science and psychology (P. Clarkson, 2003). In psychotherapy, I focus on:

• Your present issues and difficulties
• Unconscious patterns of behavior
• Relationships and attachment
• Insight and self-awareness
• Mindfulness and practice

I use my clinical training to explore your emotions, thoughts, behaviours, and relationships. You and I are actively engaged in shaping the process as well as the outcomes of therapy. This approach explores your own capacity for self-development. I help you to realise your potential. But I also take into account the social, cultural, and religious aspects of your experience.

At EnduringMind (Counselling in Hounslow area), I offer a range of approaches for individual counselling and couples counselling. This is because everyone is different. You have a unique personality, emotions, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs.

Here-and-Now Issues

Some clients are convinced counsellors will only probe them about painful experiences from the past. There is some truth in this, but it is more important to explore how you cope with the present, with your current problems. I will help you explore what triggers certain patterns of behaviour and negative emotion, or focus on your destructive impulses and ways of ‘acting out’. I will help you gain insight and make better choices going forward.

Attachment & Psychodynamic Counselling

You cannot understand the present without exploring the past. We will look at your childhood and family relationships as a way of helping you understand who you are and where you come from. It's not about blaming parents or finding excuses for the way you behave or think. However, we will be looking at how you learned to form relationships and how they became disrupted.

Although your conscious memories are one way of learning from others, most of your bonding experience is learned in the first few months of life. You form relationships at an unconscious level. And when your development is disrupted, you continue to have problems well into adult life. These issues may remain unnoticed until there is a personal crisis – such as a bereavement, trauma, or relationship breakdown.

I will help you uncover these patterns of relating and help you develop new relationships based on mutual trust and understanding. We will explore ways of how to form close relationships and how to adapt to them. I act as a 'secure base', from which you can explore relationships without fear of judgment or rejection.

Conscious Processes

First of all, I will encourage you to develop problem-solving skills and an ability to reflect. We will focus on the conscious mind while allowing you to gain insight into your behaviour and better impulse control. I will help you focus on building better communication and trust in relationships, so you can begin to feel more secure and fulfilled.

However, if you have experienced trauma, you are more likely to store painful memories, shame, and distress. When you form relationships in later life, the negative emotions of these memories may get transferred onto present relationships. You may often repeat destructive cycles without realising what you're doing. For some people, this process of ‘transference’ may happen repeatedly in new relationships until they eventually become aware of it.

Counselling can help you understand what you are doing and why, so you can learn to change your behaviour and live a better quality of life.

Unconscious Processes

In counselling, we will explore how you make sense of your instincts, impulses, and primitive emotions. The vast majority of what you learned about how to survive in the world happened long before you developed rational thoughts in childhood. We learned at an unconscious level first (S. Freud, 1919). The conscious and unconscious mind can either work together or fall into conflict, a bit like a computer which uses software for the immediate tasks it has to perform; while other processes are performed behind the scenes in the processor, RAM, and memory.

I will help you uncover the unconscious memories that lie hidden outside of your awareness. They may be associated with intense emotions and conflicts which haven’t been fully resolved. These traumatic memories are stored in your subconscious and triggered by a ‘fight or flight response’ when you're under threat. You may feel compelled to act on primal emotions like anger and fear, which are triggered at lightning speed and override your capacity for rational thought. When you're anxious or angry, you have limited impulse control. This may be because you've experienced trauma or been conditioned to react to threats during childhood.

Creativity, Dreams & Imagination

As a counsellor, I can help you access more creative regions in the brain so that you develop alternative ways of understanding and accessing the interior life of your mind. This can be through experimentation with mindfulness, meditation, or being in nature. Or expressing oneself through poetry, art, and music. If you are already open to this way of exploring yourself, this can be an enlightening and uplifting intervention in counselling. However, if you feel uncomfortable with creative expression, it is not necessary to explore this in counselling.

For example, Carl Jung (1935) believed that dreams were the gateway to our unconscious desires and fears. By unlocking your dreams, we could gain insight into your unconscious conflicts and understand them.

Neuroscience and Counselling

I put the therapeutic relationship at the heart of the counselling process. I will suggest good scientific research to help you heal your emotional wounds and "rewire your mind". Neuroscience has proved there are billions of neurons (brain cells) connecting different regions of the brain. These neurons are continually transmitting messages, building connections, and reworking them into an integrated circuit. Specific regions of the brain and neural pathways are being activated and deactivated all the time.

I believe if we experience trauma as adults, these neural networks can become disrupted. As a result, you may experience anxiety, depression, and emotional upheaval. However, you can be healed by a reparative experience with a counsellor. I am someone who offers compassion and empathy during therapy. Your relationship with me, along with encouragement and support, allows you to rewire your neural pathways and regulate your emotions. Please feel free to contact me at Counselling in Hounslow and Counselling Twickenham.