Transactional Analysis Community
The Ellesmere Centre provides a service of counselling and psychotherapy for individuals (both adults and children), couples and groups. We offer a number of registered psychotherapists and counsellors of varying modalities including:
• Transactional Analysis
• Gestalt Therapy
• Integrative Therapy
• Person Centred
• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
• Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy
They specialise in different areas of mental health and stress related issues, such as:
• depression
• post traumatic stress
• work related stress
• bereavement
• eating disorders
• personality issues
Psychotherapy is the process of exploring sometimes difficult and often painful emotions and experiences with an experienced and qualified therapist. It is a process that seeks to help the person gain an increased capacity for choice, through which the individual becomes more autonomous and self determined. A Psychotherapist works with people who have emotional, behavioural, psychological or mental difficulties.
The actual work is mainly to encourage the client to talk and explore their feelings, beliefs and thoughts, and, sometimes, relevant aspects of and events in their childhood and personal history. Some psychotherapists work to help the patient/client understand more about their problems and then make appropriate changes in their thinking and behaviour.
There are a number of different psychotherapeutic approaches: Cognitive Behavioural, Psychodynamic, Psychoanalytic, Systemic (Family & Relationship), Humanistic, Integrative, Transpersonal, Experiential, Hypno-Psychotherapy, etc
Counselling takes place when a counsellor sees a client in a private and confidential setting to explore a difficulty the client is having, distress they may be experiencing or perhaps their dissatisfaction with life, or loss of a sense of direction and purpose. It is always at the request of the client as no one can properly be 'sent' for counselling.
By listening attentively and patiently the counsellor can begin to perceive the difficulties from the client's point of view and can help them to see things more clearly, possibly from a different perspective. Counselling is a way of enabling choice or change or of reducing confusion. It does not involve giving advice or directing a client to take a particular course of action. Counsellors do not judge or exploit their clients in any way.
In the counselling sessions the client can explore various aspects of their life and feelings, talking about them freely and openly in a way that is rarely possible with friends or family. Bottled up feelings such as anger, anxiety, grief and embarrassment can become very intense and counselling offers an opportunity to explore them, with the possibility of making them easier to understand. The counsellor will encourage the expression of feelings and as a result of their training will be able to accept and reflect the client's problems without becoming burdened by them.
To view a video about the centre and some of the therapies available click here