Activate Therapy

What is therapy?

Counselling or psychotherapy is a process to help people in achieving personal change.  There are many different schools of counselling and therapy from many great thinkers.  My training is in Transactional Analysis (TA) and humanistic counselling.   In TA practitioners are trained to identify self-defeating, archaic and detrimental thoughts and beliefs and relationship patterns that are causing distress to their clients and help them change, update or reframe them.  

Who is it for?

Therapy is for anyone and everyone.  You don’t need to be ill or have problems, you just need to have a desire for things to be different.  We all carry with us negative and outdated beliefs, thoughts and behaviours which impact our happiness, relationships and life in general.  Therapy gives you time and a space to explore these with a trained professional who can help you find out what might be getting in the way, or why things keep happening the way they do.  Therapy can help you made the changes you want 

How long will it take?

This depends on what you wish to get from your therapy.  After our initial meeting and assessment, if we have agreed to work together we will develop a contract of your goals. It takes a little while for a working relationship to develop and so I recommend a minimum of 12 sessions.   We will regularly review how the work is going.   Most clients begin to feel relief after the first few sessions and begin to make positive changes for themselves very early on. Therapy ends when you have got what you came for and my experience, therapy has a natural end which is openly discussed.

Teenagers

Kids struggle and it’s great to think that they will talk to us, but often they won’t. Therapy offers a safe, non-judgemental space to speak openly and honestly to an trained adult who can offer insight and guidance. They can be angry, sad or scared without worrying about another’s feelings. All therapeutic relationships take time to nurture and your kid talking to a complete stranger about things they might find troubling or weird, is no different. When they come into therapy, there is no agenda except theirs, no pressure and in therapy, they don’t actually have to get it right for anyone except themselves – which is different from most places in their lives where expectations are placed on them continuously.

Sometimes this means that therapy can take a while and unfortunately, for you, as a parent you have no idea what’s going on which can be uncomfortable.