There are many benefits to working in a therapeutic relationship with a professional counsellor on an individual basis. It can be a relief to tell someone who is impartial about difficulties you have struggled with on your own. You may have a long-standing concern, be encountering new difficulties, or simply have a sense that something isn’t right.
What to expect from counselling
A professional can help to normalise your experience and place it in context, bring objectivity, critical distance, and experience of dealing with problems of all kinds. This often leads to seeing a problem in a new way, and feeling more able to get to grips with it.
The experience of counselling will begin with a single session in which you and your counsellor work together to make sense of your experience, to conceptualise your problems in new ways, and to think together about how you might move forward.
Some problems are of a more complex and/ or long standing kind and meeting for further sessions may be appropriate, but the aim will be to always keep counselling as efficient and focussed as possible.
In individual counselling we can work time-limited or open ended. The sessions are 50 minutes long. The frequency is set to suit the client, although when there is a break for more than two weeks it can impact the effectiveness of the counselling.