Counselling and psychotherapy works and there is ample evidence to show that talking openly helps people cope with personal difficulties.

The initial benefit of counselling and therapy is to get some relief and clarity about the problem or issue you are facing.

Exploring your thoughts and perceptions will enable you to look more deeply at current difficulties and to think about how the past may be affecting the present.

This will help you work towards making sense of your current situation: your reactions and behaviours, and your thoughts and feelings, including those of which you are less aware.

Untangle, identify and resolve

Life is often not what it is made out to be in the popular media and many people feel that something is wrong but without being able to put their finger on what it is that doesn't feel right for them. We help people who are having difficulties working out what is best for them in their personal and professional lives and concentrate on helping our clients get relief, clarity, and direction.

Contentment and satisfaction more likely than constant happiness

Contemporary life is stressful in a different way from the stress of previous generations. There are so many temptations, distractions, promises of happiness dangled in front of us daily that it is hard to work out what is best for each of us. Happiness is held up as a desirable and normal state and this tends to make people feel they are missing out on something. It is not possible to feel happy all the time. Aiming for contentment is more realistic and possible. Often this involves focusing on relationships and exploring what it not working.

We believe:

• The recent advances in neuroscience provide the evidence that psychotherapy works. It helps change unhelpful patterns stored in the brain and by extension of that, in the body. Spending time with a trained professional, who is not involved in your daily relationships and lifestyles, helps to be able to make sense of how you got to where you are today.
• Having your experience acknowledged helps to feel that what you are going through is not odd or unusual but part of being human.
• Exploring your thoughts and feelings in some depth starts a process of self awareness that can be one of life's more valuable experiences.
• It is not helpful to constantly block difficult feelings - although this may seem to be the best solution when you are trying to cope with a particular life stressor - and it can prevent you from growing as a human being. It may help to block difficult feelings out for a while but then it reaches a stage in everyone's existence where it is counter productive to refuse to acknowledge that habitual methods of coping are not working.
• A sense of relief and release comes from gaining insight.
• Anger is less likely to erupt unexpectedly when you are being listened to with empathy and your experience is validated.

We also believe that people can change when they experience a different kind of relationship from what they are used to. A professional relationship offers a special kind of space to explore what cannot safely be explored with family members, friends, and partners, because the stakes are too high; revealing one's feelings and worries can be hard to do in front of people who might be affected by such feelings. Being listened to and really heard without having to worry about the feelings of the person being addressed is the key to the start of change. Change is consolidated when people are accepted, have their experiences acknowledged and validated, and take that acceptance in and make it their own.