I can offer the following Psychotherapy & Counselling services:
Grief Counselling
Grief Counselling is designed to help people work through the feelings, thoughts, and memories associated with the loss of a loved one.
Grief therapy can involve helping someone accept the loss, adjust to life after the loss, and cope with the changes within oneself and the world after the loss.
It can help someone recognise the normal parts of the mourning process, cope with the pain associated with it, feel supported through the life changes that can follow the loss, and develop strategies for seeking support and and self-care.
Mindful Parenting
“Mindful Parenting involves keeping in mind what is truly important as we go about the activities of daily living with our children” – Jon Kabat Zinn.
Mindful parenting is designed to help people to develop an appreciation of raising children, to strengthen relationships with their children and to support themselves in parenting.
Some key practices are:
- Building self esteem and developing connections with children
- Accepting and appreciating the child as the person he/she is
- Being present even when this is painful/difficult/worrying
- Hearing and acknowledging the reality of the child’s experience
- Communicating through the different developmental stages
- Handling conflict
- Practicing compassion in parenting
- Resilient parenting – staying adult and robust
I can recommend an excellent book written by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn called Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, available here.
Relationship Counselling
Relationship Counselling assists couples and/ or individuals who are experiencing difficulty in their relationship.
Relationship Counselling is designed to help people in a relationship recognize and deal with differences and repeating patterns of stress in the relationship.
It can involve therapy and communication sessions with each other and individually to help manage differences of opinion, improve relationship communication and explore whether there is still hope or whether to end the relationship.
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy is designed to help people who suffer from repeated periods of unhappiness, stress, anxiety and/or depression.
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (also called MCBT) combines 2 areas of practice, cognitive behavioural therapy and meditative practices and attitudes based on mindfulness.
Mindfulness is about learning to pay attention to our thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, the body and the world around us in a less judgemental and compassionate way. It helps us become aware of our automatic and unhelpful cognitive reactions and develop a new relationship with them.
Mindfulness provides a set of simple yet powerful practices that one can incorporate into daily living to help break the cycle of anxiety, stress, unhappiness and exhaustion.
The key to this practice lies in becoming aware and mindful of the states of mind that characterise mood disorders while also learning to develop a new relationship with them.
Trauma Based Therapy
Trauma Based Therapy is designed to help victims of trauma to deal with the difficult feelings which occur as a result of their traumatic experience.
Trauma Based Therapy uses a range of techniques to help victims through changes in their thoughts, beliefs and behaviours.
The principal techniques in trauma-focused therapy are exposure, cognitive restructuring and learning methods for emotional and physical adjustment.
Crisis Intervention
Crisis Intervention is designed to offer immediate, short-term help to people who experience any event that causes them emotional, mental, physical or behavioural problems. Crisis Intervention is also aimed at helping people to return to their full level of functioning before the crisis occurred.
It can involve assessing the person who is in crisis or suffering from the after-effects of a crisis, after which we would explore solutions and best practices in coping with the situation.
Solution Focussed Brief Therapy
Solution Focussed Brief Therapy is designed to be a helpful, goal-oriented therapy which can produce positive results after only a few sessions. Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) has been gaining momentum as a powerful therapeutic approach since its inception in the 1980s. By focusing on solutions instead of problems, it asks clients to set concrete goals and to draw upon strengths in their lives that can help bring about the desired change for a preferred future.
Research shows it to bring about lasting change on average in less than 5 sessions and in up to 83% of referrals. It can be brief because it is future-focused and because it works with the strengths of those who come by making the best use of their resources, and it can bring about lasting change precisely because it aims to build solutions rather than solve problems.
Norma Coakley Counselling 