Bereavement, including recent and past unprocessed bereavements often from years ago.
Bullying, including overcoming the consequences of school or workplace bullying.
Divorce.
Exam nerves.
Family conflict.
Lack of confidence.
Life transitions, including life after graduation and retirement.
Loss, including redundancy and mourning the loss of being childless through circumstance.
Low mood.
Overcoming unhelpful patterns of thoughts and behaviour.
Personal development.
Phobias.
Relationship issues, particularly processing the end of a relationship.
Stress.
Stress at work.
Trauma.
Workplace bullying.
What is EMDR? Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing is a therapeutic technique for working with trauma. It enables a person to effectively process the thoughts, memory and bodily sensations connected to the traumatic memory. It taxes a person's working memory so that they don't relive the memory but effectively have one foot in the past and one foot firmly in the present with the therapist as they process their traumatic memory.
The hand movements used in EMDR are believed to reduce a person's fear, unfreeze the traumatic memory and allow it to be appropriately processed so that it no longer interferes with daily life.
How do I know that I need EMDR? I provide a free twenty minute telephone consultation, where you can discuss your thoughts, feelings and behaviour in order to see if EMDR will be suitable. People often describe feeling irritable and easily triggered by thoughts, feelings and every day situations as well as feeling that they can't experience the joy that they know their life could bring them. Other people have described disturbed sleep, heightened anxiety, flashbacks, negative emotions and avoiding specific activities, like driving, as a way to cope. Often people report that they have talked extensively about an issue but still feel that emotionally it has a hold over them.
The areas that I use EMDR for are:
Abuse.
Accidents.
Anger.
Anxiety.
Bullying.
Bereavement.
Illness.
Injury.
Medical procedure, including child birth.
Single incidents of childhood trauma.
Social humiliation.
Free, twenty-minute telephone consultation. I provide a free, twenty-minute phone consultation to see if we would work well together. If you would like to arrange this no obligation consultation, please call or text Nikki on 07954338480. Alternatively, if you dislike phone calls and would rather we did the consultation by email, please email [email protected]
How does it work? Ideally, your sessions will be weekly to enable you to have adequate time to develop an effective therapeutic relationship with me and enough space and consistency to help you process what is troubling you. Sessions are for sixty minutes and cost £60 an hour. EMDR is also for sixty minutes but costs £65 an hour.
If this isn't possible, I ask that you commit to four weekly sessions before attending fortnightly. This helps to develop our therapeutic relationship, which is crucial for your counselling to be effective. EMDR is often more effective on a weekly basis but it is possible to have fortnightly EMDR sessions although it is likely that processing will be slower.
Monthly life balance check-in sessions. Many people feel that they would like to maintain their mental health through monthly sessions. To use the analogy of car maintenance, most of us maintain our cars regularly through checking the oil and water, cleaning it regularly and maybe a yearly service. Why not apply this maintenance approach to your well being?!
Monthly life balance check-in sessions can provide you with a space to focus on your well being, deal with issues and problems as they naturally occur in your life, work on triggers, pre-empt stressful events and have a designated hour a month for you; your space for reflection, restoration and personal development. Monthly life balance check-in sessions cost £70. Current clients who wish to reduce their sessions to monthly will be able to do so for their usual session rate.
Sessions are available in person or online. For more information, please call/text Nikki on 07954338480 or email [email protected]
Single Session Therapy. Single session therapy aims to provide clients with help when they need it to address a specific issue. It is a single session, for an hour, as the name suggests! There is no assessment and the focus is very much on working with what can be achieved in the hour, through identifying strategies and resources that can help you and by creating a brief action plan, for you to take away.
All clients are required to complete a pre-session questionnaire which must be emailed back to me forty-eight hours before your session. This will enable you to get the most out of your session.
The aim is to provide you with what you need in one session. However, if further sessions are required, the cost will be at the standard session rate of £60 an hour. Single session therapy costs £70 an hour. It is available in person or online.
Anxiety is one of the commonest mental health conditions. It can be both physically and emotionally debilitating. I know from personal experience how beneficial counselling can be. Counselling can provide you with somewhere to express your anxiety, however irrational things might feel. It can provide you with somewhere to be listened to, without judgement, where your feelings can be validated and understood.
Together, we can understand where the anxiety is coming from and what strategies might be useful to help restore a sense of inner calm again.
Many clients feel anxious due to unprocessed traumatic events such as childhood or workplace bullying, accidents, medical procedures or a bereavement. Talking through these past traumatic experiences with a trained professional can help you process these events so that they no longer continue to be triggered in the present day.
Many clients have current day anxieties and stresses that they also want to talk about. We live in an increasingly uncertain world: the pandemic, the cost of living crisis, the war in Ukraine and an ever more precarious job and housing market has impacted on most of us over the last few years.
Counselling can help you become more self-compassionate and strategic about dealing with what is causing you stress and anxiety. It can also give you the mental space to become more aware of what needs to change in your life and to bring those positive changes about in a safe, supportive environment.
It is also possible to have a combination of counselling and hypnotherapy sessions. This enables you to have the space to share what is troubling you and then to experience deep relaxation which will suggest the behaviour changes that you want to implement.
I bring my lived experience of being an ex-teacher to my work; previous clients, working in the education sector, have commented on how beneficial this has been.