Counselling

Counselling is an enabling, empowering relationship with a disciplined helper. It is a process in which the client engages in a conversation to identify, address, and resolve personal and interpersonal issues and concerns with the intention of identifying options for change and creating a positive outcome. It offers support in times of crisis as well as personal development and psycho-education.

Counselling enables the client to explore both the presenting and deeper aspects of an issue or problem and to have it mirrored back in order to enable accurate understanding of what the client is saying, feeling, and thinking, and to begin see the action that needs to be taken. With counselling, the client’s dysfunctional beliefs and behavioural patterns -- from childhood, trauma, cultural impact, or the self -- can be changed. The process creates more self-awareness and new, more effective behaviours are learned.

The counsellor’s role is to engage the client in an authentic, trust-based relationship and to guide the client towards his or her own solution and the creation of a sustainable future reality. The counsellor does not explicitly spell out what to do; the solutions should be created by the client.

The counsellor may use different theory-based approaches or tools tailored to the client’s specific needs and unique situation. Whatever approach is taken, each client’s values, cultural traditions, and beliefs will be respected.

Counselling encourages a person to take themselves and their own views and feelings seriously until they feel strong enough to do so without the assistance of a counsellor. It encourages the client to discover their own inner resources and to overcome obstacles to living a more satisfying life.

Counselling can offer guidance on stress relief, anger management, grief and bereavement, life transitions, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, binge drinking and eating, addictions, sleep disorders, personality disorders (e.g., borderline personality, narcissistic personality, obsessive-compulsive disorder), as well as intrapersonal and interpersonal relationship issues.

Practitioners at IMI
Catriona Rogers, Counselling Psychologist