How can counselling help me?

It helps to talk to someone impartial in a confidential setting, to explore the difficulties you are experiencing.  In regular sessions, you can look at aspects of your life with someone who will not judge you or give advice.  Strong bottled up feelings of grief and anxiety can become very intense, and being able to express those feelings can help alleviate the stress they cause.

Sometimes, unhelpful patterns learnt in childhood are being repeated again and again.  Insight into this can be gained through counselling and these patterns can be shifted.  This allows us to make the necessary changes in our lives and helps us to move forward and be happier ourselves.  Often coping strategies are needed to enable us to deal with certain feelings such as stress, anxiety and worrying.  These feelings are processed in sessions as it helps to allow and release negative feelings that may be stored up and become harmful to us.

We have found that people who are dealing with grief and loss of a loved one may benefit from exploration of faith and how this can help.  This is also true of those who have been experiencing suicidal thoughts and can no longer see a way forward.  Sometimes we signpost people to other support including the NHS Crisis team, Cruse, Sands or support through the church.  Prayer can be very beneficial during these times of crisis.  

You will usually have sessions every week or every fortnight on the same day and at the same time (this can be decided at the Assessment).

Since the start of the pandemic, sessions have been delivered via video conferencing such as Zoom, Teams and Whats App.  Face-to-face sessions will resume as soon as church activities start up again which they are beginning to do.  ( Updated June 2021)