What happens in the first counselling session?
If you’re considering starting counselling, you are welcome to contact us to arrange a free, 15 minute initial call / online meeting, where we can discuss how the sessions would operate. This would include session length (usually 1 hour), frequency of sessions and cost.
During our first session (in person, online or over the phone), we will take a few essential details from you, and briefly outline how we work, from both a practical and ethical perspective. Once you are happy to go ahead with counselling, we can begin our work together.
In our first full session, we’ll get an understanding of what has brought you to counselling. You may have some hopes about what will and won’t happen in our sessions, so we’d like to hear about those, and we can discuss how best to progress our work together. We have a variety of techniques and methods at our disposal, and we will collaborate to decide where feels best to start.
What if I don’t know where to start?
People often worry that they won’t know where to begin. It’s absolutely normal to be anxious about telling your story but there’s no right way to do it. There are as many different ways to begin counselling as there are people in the world because we are all unique individuals.
We are both trained in techniques from many different kinds of counselling and psychotherapy and are confident that we will find a way to understand your problems. Whatever you bring to the first meeting is the right place for you to start and we can work from there.
Many clients report that just coming to their first appointment and knowing they’ve embarked on a journey to feeling better gives them relief and new hope.
How does Couples Counselling work?
In our experience, couples want to feel they have each other’s backs, and come to counselling when that feeling has gone missing. They feel like they can’t lean on or count on each other and that the communication between them has broken down. This causes them distress, their defences come into play and they get stuck in exhausting, repeating patterns of negative communication. If that resonates with you, that’s what we can work on together. We’ll identify those patterns, discover where they are coming from and work together to change them.
Can I choose whether to work in person, online or over the phone?
Yes, we offer in-person sessions, online sessions and telephone counselling, as well as hybrid versions that mix different working methods if that is helpful to you. If you’d like to know more about how this works then we can outline that for you in a short, introductory chat.
