With Feelings
Our work specialises in helping clients to understand and separate feelings belonging to the present from those that were created in our pasts; perhaps different sources from which all sorts of different feelings come to exist overwhelmingly together in the present. The sources of those feelings are disentangled so that each can be better understood and processed. Our clients are then able to work with requiting those past experiences and feelings, to process those feelings and to recognise when they are ambushed by feelings that do not belong in their present reality.
From Then to Now
Our clients arrive knowing that they feel dreadful; they cannot cope; they may be in despair; they carry and encounter feelings that are not tolerable. These feelings and the clients description are generally known as ‘the presenting issues’.
We treat these ‘presenting issues’ not as the issue or a diagnosis in itself but as symptoms of the underlying cause. The underlying cause, in our experience, lies in understanding that feelings, the symptoms, are a response to lifes various experiences. To the various behaviours towards us that we have experienced throughout life and our unconscious response to those experiences and behaviours.
The feelings we experience are often not understandable precisely because we are unable to discern where they have come from. ‘Why am I like this?’ is a common question.
Those experiences that shape us, which we do not understand, will often have happened before that part of our brain responsible for processing experience has come online.
No wonder it is so confusing.
PRESENTING ISSUES AND MENTAL HEALTH – WORKING WITH A COUNSELLOR
Taking the decision to seek support from a Psychotherapist can be daunting. It is certainly courageous. One of the essential skills of a Counsellor is to create a deep and mutual trust between the Psychotherapist and client in the knowledge that for some clients even talking about how they feel can initially be too much.
The Therapist will talk to you about your presenting issues which can be represented by a multitude of possibilities but are often known by words such as depression; low self-worth or low esteem; anxiety, stress, trauma of various descriptions; anger. The Therapist will then facilitate an exploration of how it was you may have to feel like this in your world.
You were not born with poor mental health or any of these symptoms. They have however come to define you from somewhere. The Therapists role is to make the unknown known so that these Mental Health challenges can be worked through and requited. So that the true you can be liberated.
