'' prioritising yourself is the 1st step to freedom ''

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or (CBT as it commonly known) or CAT

  stands for Cognitive Analytic Therapy; a collaborative programme for looking at the way a person thinks, feels and acts, and the events and relationships that underlie these experiences (often from childhood or earlier in life). The emhasis on the important role of thinking in how we feel and what we do.It its very heart is the concept that the root of any feeling or behaviour is a thought and that for negative feelings or behaviors specifically, quite often an irrational thought.

CBT helps us to make sense of our significant emotional reactions by dividing them up into smaller parts, allowing us to break them down and understand the relationship between situations we find ourselves in, the thoughts we have about them, how this makes us feel both physical and emotionally, and the actions we then take.

Each of these areas can and will affect the others, so how you think about a situation can and probably will affect how you feel physically and emotionally. It can also alter what you do about it.

And by better understanding the relationship between these smaller parts, we are much more able to recognise habitually negative patterns of thinking and how they effect us. As a result, we are better able to intervene in our own cognition to ensure we start changing the way we think, feel and behave.  

Having trouble with your sexual identity, coming out or telling people about it?  Whether this be a cultural issue or a stigma, This is for you.

 By talking through the problems you face with a trained therapist in a safe, non-judgemental and confidential environment you can begin to build up a solid base of support that can equip you with the coping strategies to challenge the problems you face. Your therapist can provide you with the tools and techniques to be able to cope effectively with events/situations that might precipitate distress, and help you explore complex and painful emotions in safety and comfort. Your therapist can target surrounding issues such as depression, anxiety or substance use which may be blocking your way to better mental health. Therapists can also explore issues surrounding sex and relationships, and support you through to achieving both your short and long-term goals. Finally, we can also offer couples counselling, if both you and your partner feel this would be of benefit to the relationship. 

 Psychoanalytical and psychodynamic therapies; the focus here is on the unconscious relationships that evolved from childhood and how they are affecting you now.  

A lot of our clients have likened depression to a black curtain of despair coming down over their lives. They describe how prolonged feelings of sadness, sorrow, and hopelessness have led to a lack of interest in many of the things in life that used to bring them pleasure and joy.

And most of our clients have tried many different ways to relieve the symptoms of their depression. From medication to counselling and from food intake to exercise, all of which may have had some short term benefit.

Rather than dealing with the symptoms, our approach is to help our clients identify and finally resolve the underlying cause of their depression so they can live altogether happier and healthier lives.

 Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) is a treatment for trauma-spectrum disorders in survivors of multiple and complex trauma. NET builds on the theory of the dual representation of traumatic memories. It is thought to contextualise the particular associative elements of the fear network, the sensory, affective and cognitive memories of trauma to understand and process the memory of a traumatic event in the course of the particular life of a client. Therefore, in NET, you, with the assistance of us, construct a chronological narrative of your life story with a focus on the traumatic experiences. Fragmented reports of the traumatic experiences will be transformed into a coherent narrative. Empathic understanding, active listening, congruency and unconditional positive regard are key components therapist’s behavior. For traumatic stress experiences your therapist asks in detail for emotions, cognitions, sensory information, physiological responses and probes for respective observations. The patient is encouraged to relive these emotions while narrating without losing their connection to the “here and now”: using permanent reminders that the feelings and physiological responses result from memories, the therapist links the experiences to episodic facts, 

We usually feel anger when we are being hurt; our boundaries are being violated; our needs are being ignored; or, during numerable other scenarios where our expectations are not being met. In these situations we express anger as a means of regaining control and in that regard, it is a

 perfectly natural state. 

However anger can become a real problem when it’s experienced too frequently, too intensely, or for long periods of time and when this occurs it can have a dramatic impact on the quality of our relationships, careers, health and lives. 

The reason why we’re successful at helping clients to resolve anger issues is because we work across both the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind.

Through the principles of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy we also work at a rational and logical level and the combination of the two can be very powerful indeed.

Add a little wisdom and that most scarce of resources within the therapeutic environment 

 We focus on helping clients affect rapid and genuine changes in the way they think, feel and behave so that old unwanted anger that seemed to have so much control over them, easily and comfortably becomes a thing of the past.

Humanistic therapies; these concentrate on your self-development in the ‘here and now’. They do not tend to dwell on the past.  

Our self-esteem is based on a set of judgments we unconsiously make in relation to our value and worthiness in life. It is therefore critical to our ability to live a happy and healthy life.

It is a fact that in terms of self esteem, we are all born equal. We are all born believing that we are the most valuable human being in the universe and that everyone else is there to serve our needs,

However as a direct result of our formative conditioning and early life experiences, that very natural and valuable of resource can be damaged.

As a result we can grow up believing that we are not worthy of love and success, or that we are not enough to achieve them, or that generally we do not fit in.

This invariably means that we are more prone to difficult emotions such as anxiety, depression, anger, jealousy or the like and, that life’s little knocks seem to have a grater impact on us than others.

Ultimately, having low self-esteem can have huge implication on our ability to feel secure, confident, content, assertive and ultimately happy.

Art Therapies In counselling and psychotherapy art therapies encourage clients to use artistic expression to communicate their problems in different ways to their therapist. The creative expression of art therapies has been found to assist in the recovery of mental distress. By using creative arts in a therapeutic setting with a specialist therapist clients are able to draw on their inner resources and express their thoughts and emotions without speaking. Art therapies are types of psychotherapy that uses art and other artistic mediums to help people challenge their thoughts and emotions in a different way. The concept is to use art as the primary means of communication, something that can be useful for those who find it difficult to say how they feel. 

These modalities are practical, use physical objects and require movement. This frequently enables people to express more about how they view and feel the world around them. Art therapies can be beneficial to many groups of people including children, the elderly and those in custody. participants do not need to be good at art, drama or music as their work cannot be criticised as it is their expression of emotions being released.