Therapy is an opportunity to work on things in your life, and to find more satisfying and rewarding ways of living.
At Insight Counselling we offer you a safe, confidential space where you can talk about yourself and your life. Counselling services are available to residents of Dundee and Angus. You are also eligible to use our services if you are registered with a GP in Dundee or Angus.
Counselling will offer you an opportunity to think and talk about yourself and your concerns in a way that you often can’t do with family and friends. You will be offered a place and time which is just for you to talk about those things that bother you.
Our counsellors work hard to create a good therapeutic relationship with you so that you can work well together. We understand that it is not always easy to talk about problems and to express your feelings.
We will listen to the way you feel and how this affects you and others in your life. At Insight Counselling we accept the way you are without judging you and support you to make the changes you would like to happen.
You can be referred by your GP or other health professional or, if you prefer, you can self-refer using our online self-referral form
We try to be as flexible as possible around the practical arrangements for therapy
Making the Most of Your Therapy
At Insight Counselling, we try to be as flexible as possible around the practical arrangements for therapy. Clients attend for a 50 minute session at the same time each week.
There may be constraints on what the therapist can offer, in terms of their schedule, the availability of therapy rooms, or the demand on the service – but they will do their best to accommodate your needs.
If you are ready to get started head over to our referral form.
A Therapy “Menu”
At Insight Counselling, there are many different ways in which we can help you. We like to think of ourselves as providing you with a therapy ‘menu’, so that you can decide, with our support, what you would most like to work on. Some of the issues that clients often choose to focus on are:
- Talking through an issue in order to make sense of what has happened, and to put things in perspective
- Making sense of a specific problematic event that sticks in your mind; problem-solving, planning and decision-making
- Changing behaviour
- Negotiating a life transition or developmental crisis
- Dealing with difficult feelings and emotions
- Finding, analysing and acting on information
- Undoing self-criticism and enhancing self-care
- Dealing with difficult or painful relationships.
Often, clients find it most helpful to work on these issues on a step-by-step basis. One of the ways that therapy may help is that your therapist can work with you to disentangle the various strands of the problem, and help you to decide what needs to be dealt with first.
A flexible, personalised approach to helping you
The therapy that we offer is based on the belief that people who come for therapy are experts on their own lives (even if they don’t feel they are), who have lots of potentially good ideas about how to deal with their problems. One of the main roles of a counsellor, as we see it, is to help the person to make best use of their experience and understanding.
This means that our integrative and pluralistic approach to therapy is to try to be as flexible as possible in responding to your needs. What we find (this is backed up by research) is that different people are helped in different ways. For instance, what some people find most helpful in their therapy is to express their feelings. Other people find it more helpful to take a rational approach to their problems, and use the therapy to ‘think things through’.
The following sections look at some ways you can prepare yourself to get the most benefit from the therapy you receive.
You can be referred by your GP or other health professional or, if you prefer, you can self-refer using our online self-referral form to obtain a session online or face-to-face.
1. Thinking about what you want from therapy
It is important for your counsellor to know what it is that you want to achieve in therapy – what your goals are. Your goals are a kind of ‘contract’ or agreement between you and your counsellor, which specify what you want from him or her. Counselling is the start of a journey. It may not be possible to achieve all of your goals in six sessions and that is ok.
At the start of therapy, most people find it hard to be clear about exactly what it is that they want to achieve. They have maybe only a vague sense of what they hope to get from the therapy. This is perfectly normal – your counsellor will encourage you to talk about your goals, and gradually they will become clearer. It is fine to have lots of goals, or just one goal. It is fine for your goals to change. What is important is to let your counsellor know what it is that you want from therapy.
One of the ways that you can get the most out of therapy is to spend some time on your own thinking about your goals, before the first session, and between sessions. It can be useful to write your goals on a piece of paper, so you don’t forget them. It is useful to keep your therapist updated if your goals change.
2. Thinking about what you think will be most helpful for you
As mentioned earlier, there are big differences between people in respect of what they find helpful in therapy. There is little point in the counsellor trying to work with you to tackle a problem in a particular way if you think that the approach being taken is a waste of time! It is very useful, therefore, if you can think about what you believe might work best for you, and share these ideas with your counsellor.
You can do this by thinking back to times when you have had problems before, and identifying what was helpful or not helpful for you these times. You might also think about what you have heard from friends or family members, or seen on the TV, about how therapy can help. For instance, some people find it useful to be taught how to behave in different ways, others find it useful to ‘blow off steam’ and, for others, what is most useful is to try to solve problems in practical ways. Whatever you think is most helpful to you, your counsellor will try to help you with this.
3. Identifying your own personal strengths and resources
The therapy you are being offered is not about diagnosing or labelling you. Instead, your counsellor will assume that you possess a range of skills, experiences, relationships and abilities that can be used to overcome your present problems. Part of the job of the counsellor is to help you to identify your existing strengths and resources, and work out how you can apply them in your current situation.
It may be useful if you have a think about your strengths and resources and share these with your counsellor.
4. Between Therapy Sessions
Between therapy sessions, your counsellor reviews what happened in the last sessions, and thinks about what they might do in the next sessions to take things forward. It is valuable if you do the same. Sometimes it can be helpful to work with your counsellor to agree ‘homework’, or ‘experiments’, or ‘projects’ that you could complete between sessions.
Even if this doesn’t happen, it is still useful for you to think about what has come up in the therapy, whether you are getting what you need, how the therapy can be improved, and so on. It can be hard to remember these thoughts, and one option to consider is keeping a therapy diary, where you write about what the therapy has meant to you.
5. Giving feedback to your therapist
Effectively tailoring the therapy to your specific needs is only possible if you are willing to give honest feedback to your counsellor. Your counsellor will also ask you for feedback and comments during the therapy session, or may invite you for feedback halfway through, or when your sessions end.
When giving feedback, it is really important that you are as honest and detailed as you can be. Ultimately, your counsellor genuinely wants to help you, and does not want you to pretend that everything is OK when it isn’t.
If you are worried about anything – please ask
Finally, there may be other questions that have not been covered, that would make a difference to your ability to make effective use of our therapy. If you have any further questions, please ask your counsellor. If for any reason it is an issue that you do not want to mention to your counsellor, you can contact a member of Reception regarding this.
If you are ready to get started with counselling, use the button below.