What do counsellors / psychotherapists do?

Provide a safe, private ‘breathing space’ from the rest of your life

• It’s a place for you, focussed on your needs and concerns
  
• Talking to someone separate from your day to day life can help you think about yourself freely, in a way which is sometimes difficult with friends and family

Listen to you with respect and care

• Accepting you as you are, without judging you
• Therapists seek to understand exactly how you see the world; using their training and experience, they will try and help you make connections between things and see the ‘bigger picture’

Work with you to improve your wellbeing

• Helping you to plan changes you want to make in your life and form strategies for managing this
• A trained therapist brings a professional understanding of exploring complex issues, and experience of managing change with structure and focus

Support you through difficult experiences

• Sometimes trying to understand how we feel can seem impossibly difficult; sometimes our feelings or experiences can be so painful, we are frightened by them. A therapist stays with you in the painful, lost feelings and will help you to find a path out of the difficulty which you might not have seen.