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PSYCHOTHERAPY AND COUNSELLING
Counselling and Psychotherapy are often called the talking therapies. Both aim to help people make sense of their lives and find a way forward that is more creative and less exhausting. It has been said that the purpose of therapy is to enable people to love and to work: to help people live fuller lives. We all know from experience that talking problems through with a friend or family can help us. Doing this with a therapist enables us to go into greater depth with a neutral person who has no agenda of their own. A confidential space where the story will stay. The opportunity to revisit an event in safety and begin to tell one’s own story with one’s own words. Where events from the past can make sense of the present.
Therapists are interested in hearing about people’s childhoods and younger lives because many of the strategies and ways of coping we have now were developed then. At three or ten or fifteen years old we may have learned ways of dealing with difficulties, or inappropriate methods for getting what we need, or we became anxious and felt out of control, and now as adults we have become locked into those patterns without realising it.
Therapy aims to help people see that they can safely change these behaviours.
It sometimes feels as though therapy helps someone turn the map of their life round so that they can make sense of it. Therapy cannot take past traumas away but it can help make sense of them, help make them more manageable.
Sometimes therapy focuses much more on the here and now as people come with very specific issues from their adult life for instance fertility, marital problems, difficulties within families or ill health such as chronic pain.
Therapists within the Bury Practice are individuals using their own personalities, training, creativity and scientific knowledge in different ways. No therapist will be suitable for all clients - one might feel too approachable to one person and another might be too much of a statue or blank screen to someone else. It is important to use the first appointment to see if it feels like a “good fit” and whether a working alliance can be formed.
Therapy can be long term several times a week for many years, or only a few sessions. It depends on many things and what people are looking for. Some therapists have contracts of e.g. six sessions and some therapists are happy to be open ended. The individual profiles of each therapist give more specific information.
Clinicians offering this service: