Counselling

Counselling involves listening attentively to the pressing personal and external problems that people bring to us, thereby meeting their need to be listened to – a need that may not have been met often or at all in their lives. Through the act of talking and expressing themselves in a safe environment to a skilled and impartial listener who gives positive and empathic feedback, self-helpers are able to discharge to some degree held-in emotions and long-established patterns of feeling and thinking that have held them back from experiencing happiness.

Having established the nature and effects of a person's problems it is possible to investigate, at the person’s own pace, how the emotional stresses in their lives have led them into traps – double-binds – from which they may have long felt unable to escape.