Psychotherapists work with you to heal historic wounds playing out in your present. Counselling psychologists often use psychotherapeutic techniques in their work.

Protective patterns in childhood play out in our present - but may no longer serve us in adult relationships. Psychotherapy and counselling psychology can help you bring awareness to old patterns, enabling you to connect more deeply and authentically with yourself and others.

Psychotherapists and counselling psychologists work with you to explore existing patterns of relating. As this increases awareness of your typical patterns, you’ll create greater space for change.By being able to witness your responses to triggering events, you slow the impulse to react, creating inner space for big feelings. Rather than allowing overwhelm to control your narrative, you’ll find that over time, you’re able to write new stories.Counselling psychology and psychotherapy can help with relationship issues: divorce or breakup, communication difficulties, infidelity, intimacy issues, or parenting challenges.Disconnection - bereavement, loss, loneliness and isolation are common reasons for seeking therapy. You may still feel lonely, even if you have lots of relationships.Trauma, anxiety, depression or difficulty regulating your emotions.Your relationship with food and body image.Abuse of any kind; sexual, emotional or physical – whether in the past or your present.Self-harm and thoughts of suicide.

Psychotherapists have typically trained for 4-5 years at a postgraduate level.Psychotherapy is well-suited to medium or long term support, especially if you have a condition that has developed over a long period of time during early life, or through trauma.Psychotherapists consider their relationship with you as fundamental to the therapeutic process. They often draw on psychodynamic and attachment theory to explore transference of old patterns in relationships and how these patterns continue to play out in your current life.Though most of our wounds occur in our earliest relationships, healing also occurs in safe relationships. By fostering a safe therapeutic relationship, our usual defensive patterns can relax, paving the way for healing and new, genuine ways of being.

Counselling psychologists have a similar level of training as a psychotherapist.Counselling psychologists use psychotherapeutic and counselling techniques to help you explore how your history is playing out in your present. They adopt a similar approach to psychotherapists, which focuses less on diagnosis or pathology, and more on how your mental and emotional landscape affects you, and what brings meaning to your life. Counselling psychology may be shorter term than psychotherapy.

As well as talk therapy, psychotherapists and counselling psychologists may use a range of trauma-informed approaches, such as body based therapy, mindfulness, somatic experiencing, EMDR, art, play or movement. These subtler approaches reach the deeper parts of the brain, connected to the limbic system. Working at this level is essential to heal the effects of trauma.Our formative emotional experiences occurred when we didn’t have words to verbalise how we felt. Working non-verbally helps process emotions that cannot be resolved through talking, and when done skilfully can even heal some of the complex formative patterning in the brain to broaden your “window of tolerance” when exposed to emotionally stressful situations.