Counselling and Psychotherapy
Counselling is a safe and confidential collaboration between one of our qualified counsellors and the client. The goal of counselling is to improve your emotional wellbeing and promote insights into how you and why you respond to events and situations in the way you do.
Our counsellors work across the ages from children to older people.
Counselling can help improve your listening and communication skills as well as your confidence to deal with personal problems as they arise.
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is a holistic approach that helps you to become aware of conscious and unconscious factors, and involves the mental, emotional, behavioural, relational, existential and spiritual health of the person.
As well as talking, our therapists incorporate many approaches, including group interaction, art, music, dance, body work, drama, sand play, movement and energy work, and soul work.
Psychotherapy may be short or long term depending on many factors but ultimately Psychotherapy supports your inner healing which can lead to essential changes that improves the quality of your life.
Grief Counselling assists you to come to terms with a loss, providing a safe environment to process the experience and begin the process of healing. Grief is a natural response to loss and there is no right or wrong way to grieve. It is common to experience emotions such as anger, sadness, guilt and even fear following the loss of a loved one.
Our trauma and grief counsellors can help you to work through your emotions in a comforting and nurturing environment. We will work with you gently, at your own pace and without judgement, as you grieve and remember.
Gestalt Therapy is a psychotherapeutic approach developed by Fritz Perls (1893-1970). The word Gestalt is used in modern German to mean the way a thing has been “placed,” or “put together.” ,There is no exact equivalent in English. “Form” and “shape” are the usual translations; in psychology the word is often interpreted as “pattern” or “configuration.”
Gestalt works in the “here and now” and is a gentle yet powerful approach that helps you become aware of how past issues and events have helped shape you.
Child Centred Play Therapy
Relationship Counselling
Relationship problems can occur at any time and can be as a result of poor communication, a rupture caused by an affair or emotional infidelity, desire discrepancy leading to difficulties with sexual intimacy, financial pressures or the day to day life of sharing household chores. Other factors can include blended families, ageing parents, parenting differences and workplace stresses.
Relationship Counselling can help the couple to hear from each other and to work through any ‘unfinished business’ between them which can foster resentment and hanging onto their sense of being wronged or not heard. Both people gain insight into how they may be contributing to the issues and with a “no blame” approach our skilled counsellors can facilitate listening and much needed conversations. The couple learn new skills along with their insights they can easily apply to assist them at home too.
Relationships Therapy takes Relationships Counselling to a deeper level. Both people may activate old unintegrated traumas in the other, together they can explore this and heal these traumas whilst simultaneously learning about each others process and way of being in the world. This deeper knowing of each other increases intimacy and safety and enables the emotional growth of a supportive and interested partner.
Developed by Kent Hoffman, Glen Cooper and Bert Powell in the 1980s and based on John Bowlbys research on child/mother attachment, the Circle of Security Parenting educates parents on healthy attachment; What it is, why it is important and how to achieve it.
Many factors influence how you parent, and research has shown that offering ways to be with your children when they are distressed, angry, happy, sad etc can enable them to feel safe and secure and provide an essential gateway to their well being, both in their childhood and also into their future.
Programs can be tailored for individuals but are usually held with small groups over a minimum of 8 sessions.
Secure attachment is knowing that someone has your back, and knowing someone has your back opens a world of new possibilities.
Deborah runs COSP programs for individuals and couples who are unable to attend set time and day programs offered by other organisations.
Please contact Deborah on 0458 677 108 for more information.
Mediation and Family Dispute Resolution
Family Dispute Resolution
In Australia, since 2006, the Family Law Act provides that all people who have a dispute about children, (under Part VII of the Act) must make a genuine effort to resolve that dispute by Family Dispute Resolution (FDR) before they can make any legal applications to the Family Court. Family Dispute Resolution is the process of facilitated mediation that enables this non-legal and non-adversarial pathway to take place.
The process is facilitated by a Family Dispute Resolution Practitioner (FDRP) who has a formal qualification in FDR, is accredited with a recognized professional body and is registered with the Federal Attorney General’s Department to provide FDR.
Mediation is a process in which the differing parties discuss their dispute with the assistance of a trained and impartial third person. We can mediate workplace disputes and specialise in mediating in the health sector whether it is an NGO, private or public health sector organisation.
Trauma according to Bessel van der Kolk, “Is an event that overwhelms the Central Nervous System and changes the way we remember and react….it is something we are incapable of assimilating and integrating into our life”.
There are 2 distinct types of trauma; single event trauma (often diagnosed as PTSD) such as a car accident, bush fire or assault; and complex trauma or attachment trauma which is the result of ongoing neglect or abuse, usually beginning in childhood.
Gabor Mate said, “Trauma is not what happens to you. It is what happens inside you”. He elaborates and says the features of trauma are disconnection from self and disconnection from others and changes in our capacity to function on a day to day basis.
Trauma therapy provides a safe place to be met by a compassionate therapist who will be interested in you and pay attention with you, to what is going on. Healing arises through the interpersonal connection so the journey towards processing the trauma and integration of it can naturally happen. It involves working with the nervous system to expand your capacity to feel safe, grounded and connected and to learn about living in the present moment, rather than being vigilant and fearful of a past that has already happened.
Family Therapy
Family Therapy can help resolve conflicts and improve communication. This way of working with the whole family, rather than individuals, sees the family system as a functioning unit. In Family Therapy we appreciate and recognise the individuals and deal with the personal relations and interactions of the family members, both inside the family and in the counselling room which then includes the therapist, family and broader community.