What is Psychotherapy and Counselling

Psychotherapy allows clients to understand the origins of those unhealthy patterns that have been acquired or adopted since childhood and currently have a negative impact on their lives as adults. When clients are aware of these patterns, they are able to challenge them, make fundamental changes and replace them with healthy patterns, behaviours and emotions which leads to a more fulfilling life. Counselling enables clients to increase their personal power to address issues that are currently affecting their life by gaining understanding of the current issues and developing skills to better manage those difficulties.

Who can benefit from psychotherapy and counselling?

Anyone can benefit from psychotherapy and counselling. People do not need to have a mental disorder in order to see a psychologist or a counsellor. Psychotherapy and counselling is for anyone who wants to have the assistance of a professional to help them improve their emotional wellbeing, their relationships, their quality of life or develop better skills to manage certain situations that are inherent to life transitions. Psychotherapy and counselling is also for those individuals experiencing mental health disorders. Having the opportunity to see a professional highly increases the possibilities of a better recovery, better management of the illness and better quality of life for the client.

Difficulties can arise in every relationship. Sometimes these difficulties are managed by the couple, however sometimes these difficulties need an objective professional who can serve as a mediator, who can use diverse strategies to facilitate a safe space to discuss issues concerning the couple, explore ways to resolve problems and come to decisions that are comfortable and healthy for both parties involved.

When couples decide to seek out psychological therapy or counselling, they increase the opportunity to improve their communication skills, increase tolerance, respect, and the ability to listen to each other. Therefore, their capacity to resolve marital issues is enhanced.

Some of the issues we can help you with are:

• Differences in values: either due to being a couple from diverse cultural backgrounds or just due to having different set of values that are causing confusion and discomfort in the relationship.
• Communication problems: Identifying patterns of communication to analyse whether they are contributing positively to the relationship or if they are having a negative impact. Then, you can learn how to replace those dysfunctional patterns for healthier ways of communicating.
• Infidelity: Whether the couple wants to heal their relationship and continue together or they decide to separate and would like to make agreements regarding diverse matters that are involved in ending a relationship.
• Unhealthy behaviours: When couples want to have a relationship where they feel happy and that they can grow as individuals as well as a couple and have identified that they have certain behaviours that are not allowing them to fully enjoy themselves as a couple including violence, abuse, gambling, finance problems, stress, anger, excessive jealousy.
• Life transitions: For those couples who are going through significant changes in their lifespan such as recently married, parenthood, separation, retirement and so on.

We see family as a system that has a strong interconnection between its members as well as a connection with other bigger systems in society. Therefore, its wellbeing depends on the members’ wellbeing and viceversa. For this reason, we believe healthy families mean healthy individuals and also healthy societies.

Families can benefit in different ways. They can seek out counselling because there is a trigger issue that brings the family’s attention to the problematic situation and moves its members to address it. Seeking counselling is one of the strategies the family can use to strengthen their relationships during challenging times.

Family counselling is also beneficial for families who are going through changes in life and are struggling to adjust to the new situation.

What can be achieved:

• To understand how each one of the family members are contributing to the wellbeing of the family
• To learn how to strengthen family ties and reconnect with each other with respect, appreciation and love.
• To learn to honour individuality while maintaining a sense of belonging to the family.