Ealing & Harrow Counselling Service

Counselling with the Ealing and Harrow Service

The decision to find counselling is a significant step in anyone's life, but it is often difficult to know where to start looking. We have many years of experience of helping people to find what is the most appropriate form of help for them, and so the first appointment we offer to everyone is an extended meeting of around an hour and a half or so with an experienced counsellor. In this meeting, there will be time for you and the counsellor to explore your situation in some depth, and for you to discuss your needs and preferences. If it is felt that our type of counselling would be the most appropriate and you feel comfortable with it, we will arrange a placement for you with one of our counsellors. If, on the other hand, there may be other, more appropriate forms of help, we will endeavour to find you a professional within that field.

The type of counselling offerred within this network is "psychodynamic". This means that your counsellor will want to work with you to identify the roots of your difficulties so that you can begin, with the help of the counselling, to alter the way you respond to situations, and change the way that you experience yourself and the world around you. To this end, your counsellor will be interested not only in the issues that you want to bring to counselling, but also in the way the relationship between you develops.

The types of difficulties for which psychodynamic counselling can be helpful include:

anxiety

stress

phobias

post traumatic stress disorders

trauma experienced in childhood

obsessional/compulsive thoughts/behavior

grief and bereavement

low moods

relationship difficulties

isolation

difficult relationships with food

difficulty controlling feelings

self-harm

feeling of pointlessness

low self-esteem/ difficulties with self-worth

artistic/creative "blocks"

work difficulties

difficulties in decision-making

unhappiness

feeling stuck/unfulfilled in life

Very often, people look for counselling when a crisis is occurring in their lives, and this type of counselling can help to sustain them through the crisis. Since many people will have found themselves repeatedly in similar crises in their lives, it can then proceed to an exploration with the aim of understanding of how the crisis came about, and how similar crises might be averted or dealt with differently in the future.

People with no particular difficulties in their lives may feel that they want to get to know themselves better, to get to understand more of their internal world, and this type of counselling is also ideally suited to this.