Hesther Somerville MBACP

The need for a compassionate and non-judgemental listener can be felt by anybody at any time in their lives, perhaps at a time when some sort of change happens – change of job, a house move, a loss of someone significant, for example.  

Speaking to someone in a confidential setting can really help to alleviate the feelings of being overwhelmed or of not coping well.  Perhaps there are difficult decisions to be made, or a new set of realities to come to terms with.  You may hit a crisis point in your life when you realise ‘enough is enough!’ and you feel you are hitting a dead-end or going round in circles and getting nowhere.  I can work with you collaboratively to help you navigate your way through the issues that are troubling you, and support you in making sense of how you got to where you are now, creating a safe space where you can take stock and find your way forward. 

Counselling is a time-limited therapy which is helpful for people who need to focus on a specific difficulty for a brief period of time: perhaps you’re faced with a challenging problem and you need to ‘get something off your chest’, or perhaps life feels overwhelming and you need someone to help you work through difficult issues.  It may feel too much of a burden to pour it all out to friends or family, and you can’t always be sure of confidentiality, or perhaps you feel too ashamed, or vulnerable, to share with someone you know for fear of being judged.  You may be concerned that rumours about you might spread, or perhaps there just simply is no one you can turn to.  A safe and confidential space allows you to speak out what’s troubling you so that you can ‘see the wood for the trees’.  

Psychotherapy is an open-ended therapy for more complex issues in which the therapeutic relationship between therapist and client is also a focus of the work.  It may be that the difficulties you are having with others arise between us, and this will give us an opportunity to explore and understand these difficulties.  The quality of the therapeutic relationship allows an opportunity for healing to take place.  In this setting we can learn how to relate to others and to ourselves in a way that we perhaps did not experience during our upbringing. There might have been a rupture in your relationship with key figures in your growing up, or you experienced traumatic events during babyhood or childhood or adolescence which led to you finding strategies to survive, which later prove to be unhelpful in your relationships with people in adult life.  My training in Psychotherapy from a Soulful Perspective gives me the skills to work at depth with you, sensitively and compassionately, to help you understand and make sense of forgotten and hidden memories or sensations buried in the unconscious – tools to help unlock and work with your unconscious intelligence.  I work collaboratively with you and at your pace: safety and trust are paramount, and it takes time to establish the level of trust needed for depth work, which is why psychotherapy takes place over a longer period of time. We will establish a natural rhythm of reviewing periodically to check how our work is going and that it’s beneficial to you.

If you feel unsure about whether Counselling or Psychotherapy is appropriate for you we can discuss that.  It may be that it’s not at first obvious or clear.