Trancescend Counselling Services
What is Counselling?
The task of Counselling is to allow the client the opportunity to explore, discover and clarify ways of living more satisfactorily and resourcefully.
Through empowered meaningful, and well-informed choices, the client can start to gain a resolution for emotional or interpersonal problems. These problems can be usually associated with, fear and anxiety and, sadness and depression.
As suggested through Transcends psychology section, Counselling can be seen as a relationship described through the application of psychological theories. Its overall ethos is to facilitate or empower the client through, their own understanding of their emotional and social being.
It is an activity where by people agree to be either the counsellor or the client. Within this partnership generally, the counsellor offers confidentiality, and a set of core conditions such as empathy, positive regard and honesty, that can partly facilitate a client’s understanding and growth.
As such, different counselling traditions can focus on different core conditions and techniques, with regard to the client and their environment. Emerging traditions focus on exploration and understanding whilst others focus on utilizing a professional relationship. Focusing on either the counsellor or client, as the expert on self, and identifying self-determined goals.
What are some of the different counselling traditions used at Trancescend Therapy Services?
Psychodynamic Therapy – In simple terms is an Indepth form of talk therapy. It may be less focused on the patient - therapist relationship, but will be equally focused on all aspects of the client within their external and social worlds.
Psychodynamic therapy is used to treat a whole host of problems from depression to serious psychological disorders. It focuses on difficulties in forming or maintaining relationships or mood. Whilst treating the symptoms of addictions, social and health anxieties and eating disorders, to name just a few.
The Psychodynamic therapists' goal, is to recognise, understand and overcome negative or repressed emotions and feelings within the client. It is also used to identify unconscious patterns of behaviours, - past experiences trigger for us, within our present social realities. And empower decision making and positive views for the future.
Psychodynamic therapy can be seen to have its roots in many different psychological traditions. Here at Trancescend Therapy Services, we integrate, amongst a few, the applications of Developmental and Attachment psychology, to enhance a client's understanding and change.
Person Centred Therapy – It is probably a good place to start with the person-centred view of the person. Here at Trancescend Therapy Services we believe that as human beings we are always in a state of becoming. That we have the capacity to develop in a basically positive direction given the right conditions for growth. Our ethos is that our clients can be facilitated to find their own direction in life and view, the client, as the expert on themselves.
The Person-Centred view of distress suggests that human beings have a basic need for approval. This draws us to states of being that help secure this approval from others. As we develop, we condition how we feel about ourselves through others and create a self-concept and self-worth. If this external evaluation of self-worth is at odds with our internal evaluation of self-worth, through external pressures or lack of approval. Anxiety and low self-esteem can form; creating problems with our self -concept and true selves.
The therapeutic goal in Person Centred therapy for us, at Trancescend, is to except and validate the client’s individual experiences and ways of perceiving their difficulties. As therapists, we will immerse ourselves in the client's experience.
This helps to allow the client to explore their feelings and emotions from moment to moment whilst, internalising approval, regard, empathy and a genuine feeling of care. In simple terms, this is seen to develop a client’s internal self-worth and develop confidence in their environment.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapies - Here at Trancescend Therapy Services we focus on theories of emotion. We suggest to our clients that, the ‘meaning’ we give to the past, present or in fact, future experiences, lead to our responses; not, the experience itself.
Trancescend Therapy Services allows the client to gently, bring into conscious awareness, such beliefs that condition our emotional content to the meaning of our experience.
You keep on hearing this word conditioned, so, what is its importance and how do we work with it in therapy? Also refer Neuropsychology and developmental and behavioural psychology sections.
In easy terms, conditioning, as it relates to therapy, can be seen as a response associated with an experience. It is the meaning that we give to the experience, take for example, being bit by a dog and feelings of (pain and fear) that we connect to similar events in are present and future. This determines or conditions our responses to similar situations.
These conditions of experience can become part of our belief systems, triggering fight and flight chemicals to be released in our bodies whether these events are happening in reality or not. It is not only fear and phobias, that can become conditioned but also our moods, related to sadness for example. Take for instance, the meaning we may give to a relationship breakup, “I am not worth being with.”
Beliefs such as these can tell us how we think about ourselves in the world and also tell us, how we perceive other people think about us. This in turn, feeds our self-worth and conditions our moods, to that meaning. In broad terms, if the meaning we give to a situation is negative - the emotion we connect with that experience will be negative, and vice versa. So, we experience anxiety when we anticipate physical or social danger.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy aims to bring these meanings into the conscious and identify what our beliefs about certain situations are. Trancescend Therapy Services aims to understand with the client, the key factors that are involved. This helps to enable you to start to change your problems through changing beliefs and safety seeking behaviours.
During sessions short term goals are recognised which then can be built into long term goals. Here we can start to rediscover a client’s motivation and underscore reasons to develop change. Patterns of negative thought and self-talk are also challenged and positive core beliefs are re-conditioned along -side the therapist client relationship.
Here at Trancescend Therapy services we apply techniques such as desensitisation (allowing the client to experience anxiety provoking experiences in states of relaxation, whilst teaching the client the tools to maintain these states. It is also through hypnosis or eye movement therapies that we can apply a similar and effective techniques to overcome traumatic experiences and work with the unconscious process.
This is where a combined counselling and psychology approach, in most instances with hypnotherapy, can be hugely beneficial, to get to the core of the emotional content, and have much more long-lasting affects.