One-to-one Psychotherapeutic Counselling, Cardiff

I offer a confidential and safe environment for you to openly explore any personal difficulties, challenges or needs for self- development. You will be treated with respect, without judgment and feel genuinely seen, heard and understood.    

How can it help?

Counselling can provide help for anxiety, depression and stress as well as relationship, work or family conflict.  It can support you during a personal crisis, challenge and difficult life transition.
Perhaps you have experienced a trauma or you are going through a loss or bereavement. It might be that you do not know the reasons you feel stuck or unhappy but you wish to seek a way to improve your situation.
Counselling can help since it allows you to:

• Gain self awareness and an understanding  of your thoughts, feelings and actions.
• Gain resources and tools to shift challenges into opportunities
• Explore possibilities for choice and change.
• Address how historical wounds or painful past experiences might still inform and condition your present life
• Integrate dis-owned, hidden and un resolved parts of yourself through creativity and self- acceptance.
• Gain a renewed sense of purpose

I bring together my skills, training and experience to attend to my client in their wholeness and uniqueness. Understanding the connection between body, soul, and mind is central to my work.
I provide a space for people to come to the roots of their dilemmas and themselves in a gentle and accepting way. Sometimes the most difficult circumstances can give birth to the brightest possibilities. Just as the phoenix rises from the ashes, we can gain trust and a revitalisation through embarking upon a journey of discovery and transformation.

As a support to this therapeutic process of finding hope and renewal, I offer movement and creativity along with talk and dialogue. My hope is for my clients to feel change coming from a genuine inner place, from their own self agency and fulfilment.

An embodied approach to counselling and psychotherapy 

My professional training has shown me that that in order to make effective change, the therapeutic process needs to include our body experience and intelligence. This is particularly relevant with trauma and stress where the focus is on stabilisation: reducing symptoms and creating somatic resources. 
Since emotions are felt in the body, an embodied approach will support a healthy and safe connection to sensations and feelings experienced inside the body. This promotes awareness and tolerance of feeling, if there has been any traumatic holding, freezing or numbing in the body this can also be resolved with acceptance and new expression. Feelings, sensations and emotions can be experienced as safe, normal and part of everyday human life. 

A relational awareness 

Research shows that the therapeutic relationship is the most significant factor in determining a positive outcome in counselling for the client. We are hard wired for relationship and human contact is  strong catalyst for personal change.
I provide warmth and empathy for an open and collaborative relationship  to develop between us. Genuine contact can be stimulating. It fosters self esteem and diminishes shame and negative self beliefs.  

I work with adults over the age of 16 years.

A strengths based, restorative approach to counselling.

I am trained to work with touch and I use techniques from restorative yoga and weighted therapy: wool blankets, wheat bags, and hot water bottle and aroma therapy balms at hand. I therefore also offer a restorative framework to these sessions. This can be helpful if someone  has  a physical disturbance or they have gone through a trauma or crisis that is negatively impacting upon their mental well being and quality of life.
I also work with couples who are looking for specific therapeutic support for birth preparation, infant attachment and early parenting