Counselling

What is counselling?

Counselling provides a regular time and space for people to talk about their troubles and explore difficult feelings in an environment that is safe, free from intrusion and confidential. A counsellor should respect your viewpoint while helping you to deal with specific problems, cope with crises, improve your relationships, or develop better ways of living.

Counselling helps individuals to gain insight into their feelings and behaviour and to change that behaviour, if necessary. Counsellors achieve this by listening to what their clients have to say and commenting on it from their particular professional perspective.

How can counselling help?

Individuals may seek counselling because of difficult experiences they’ve been going through, such as a relationship breakdown, bereavement or redundancy. People may also want help dealing with feelings of sadness, depression, anxiety or low self-worth that don’t seem to be connected to any specific event.

Counselling can also help people deal with and overcome mental health problems, such as an eating disorder or depression. Counselling can assist even if the individual is already getting other kinds of help from a GP or psychiatrist. It can also help people come to terms with an ongoing physical problem, illness or disability.

Counselling can also be a means of coping with physical symptoms or complaints that doctors can’t alleviate. If GPs can’t find a physical cause for someone’s problems, individuals may want to look further to see whether there is a psychological side to their symptoms.