The foundation of my approach is humanistic, drawing especially on person-centred and emotion-focused therapies. This means that I value above all else the client’s autonomy and inherent wisdom and I view our counselling journey as a collaborative venture. I believe that our emotions provide us with important information about what we need. Often, however, they can be unclear, confusing or even frightening.
In an emotion-focused approach to therapy, the therapeutic relationship is essential to the process of understanding what is causing us to feel the way we do. Our emotions are adaptive – they help us get what we need – but our emotional reactions to events are also shaped by our unique histories and relationships. Understanding the reasons we feel a certain way is a delicate but vital process through which emotions are brought to the surface and talked through to decipher how we need to act on them. This experiencing of emotions and the subsequent making sense of them through dialogue is key to our understanding of our thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
