Claremont Counselling and Consultancy

Counselling is a dedicated structured activity where one person helps another person to help themselves.

Life-cycle changes: birth, marriage, death, divorce, children leaving home, or because of destructive patterns in their lives which they want to change. Often it is to do with relationship, between couples, between families, the despair of parents at the antics of their children, or equally the disbelief of children and adolescents at the inability of adults to behave. It may be to do with a feeling of being lost, having no direction, no point to life. It can be depresssion. It can be free-floating anxiety, obsessions, phobias. It can be because of traumas, old and new. It can be because of abuse, physical, sexual, emotional. It can be because of dis-ease in one's own body, a feeling of being the wrong gender.

Whatever the problem the overall aim of counselling is to provide an opportunity for the client to work towards living in a more satisfying and resourceful way.

The client is one who comes actively and voluntarily to gain help, but without any notion of surrendering her/his own responsibility for the situation.

The counsellor is the one who provides the space, time and expertise to enable the above to happen.

Apart from cost and a fairly prevalent belief that counselling is for wimps, I believe it is mostly fear. Fear of unravelling, being overwhelmed and collapsing. This fear is unjustified. Although the work may be hard, requiring commitment, honesty and a willingness to look at ourselves, especially the aspects of our personality which we prefer to ignore, the counsellor works at the pace of the client challenging and nudging to the extent that the client can manage.