What happens in the first counselling session?
If you’re considering us working together, you are welcome to contact me to arrange a free, 15 minute initial call / online meeting, were we can discuss how the sessions would operate. This would include session length (usually 1 hour), frequency of sessions and cost.
If you decide to go ahead, during our first session (in person, online or over the phone), I will take a few essential details from you, and briefly outline how I work, from both a practical and ethical perspective. Once you are happy to go ahead with counselling, we can begin our work together.
For the duration of our first session, I’d like to get a beginning understanding of what has brought you to counselling and get a sense of what your concerns are. Also I imagine you may have some hopes about what will and won’t happen in our sessions, so I’d like to hear about those, and we can discuss how best to progress our work together. I have a variety of techniques and methods at my disposal, and we will collaborate to decide where feels best to start.
What if I don’t know where to start?
It’s absolutely normal to be anxious about unpacking your concerns and issues with a counsellor. There is no wrong place to start. There are as many different ways to start counselling as there are people in the world. We are all unique individuals, with unique experiences and stories.
I have trained using techniques from many different kinds of counselling and psychotherapy. I am confident that, together, we will find a way to understand your problems that feels manageable for you. Whatever you bring to our first meeting is the right place for you to start and we can work from there.
Many clients report that just coming to their first appointment and knowing they’ve embarked on a journey to feeling better gives them relief and new hope.
How does Couples Counselling work?
In my experience, couples want to know they have each other’s back, and couples who come in often feel like that’s missing - that they feel like they may have lost something, and they can’t lean on or count on each other. This causes them distress, their defences come into play and they get stuck in an exhausting negative repeating pattern of communication. And if that sounds it resonates with you, that’s what we can work on together. We’ll figure out those patterns, where they are coming from, and how to change them.
Can I choose whether to work in person, online or over the phone?
Yes, I offer in-person sessions, online sessions and telephone counselling, as well as hybrid versions that mixes different working methods if that is helpful to you. If you’d like to know more about how this works then I can outline that for you in a short, introductory chat.
