“Ring the bells that can still ring. Forget your perfect offering. There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

Leonard Cohen

I listen.
I work creatively and with compassion.
I offer confidentiality, empathy and acceptance.
I encourage awareness, which leads to meaningful change.

Creative counselling offers unique and creative approaches to allow clients to explore different arenas of psychotherapy to promote emotional well being and healing.

While trained in therapeutic processes, combining the use of artistic, energy and creative approaches, allow the client to explore using all the senses and dictate where the path of therapy will lead.

Some of the tools I can offer to you :

ENERGY PSYCHOLOGY

EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique)

This technique works to identify the emotional root of your problem and to resolve it quickly. It has been proven successful in healing phobias, anxiety, stress, PTSD, fear, pain, cravings addictions, insomnia and weight issues.

Tapping is a simple but effective technique somewhere in between hypnosis, meditation, and acupressure. You can learn it in a matter of minutes and use it to apply instant relief to stressful situations in your life.

Clients “tune in” to their emotional issue while stimulating stress relief points (meridian energy points) by tapping on them with their fingertips. This provides a meridian “balancing effect” that replaces the emotional “pull” of the problem with a form of peace.

DFT DISSOLUTION & FREEDOM TECHNIQUE

This technique is very effective in clearing long standing physical pain (not always caused through injury) or illnesses as well as feelings that people seem to get stuck in or that occur continually. The results are lasting and allow the client to experience those feelings locked in the illness, and when they first occurred, without much know-how from the client or the practitioner.

The principles of this technique can be seen from a Shamanic viewpoint in that conscious energies that vibrate at the same frequency as the unresolved or resisted feelings are ‘locked in’ and continue to support that same frequency & feeling/s.

When experienced rather than suppressed, the conscious energies are released and the person is free to experience who they are beyond the neuroses.

SAYING GOODBYE TO CONSCIOUS ENERGIES

If the client looks back on their life they will see that they have a repertoire of feelings and sensations that have been appearing all through their life.

Some of this feelings and sensations can be conscious energies (consciousness) trapped in a role within us. This role is played out as a feeling or sensation when we are unwilling to accept an experience such as fear, grief or hate etc.

With them they bring strategies, just like most people have strategies they use to help themselves survive or operate in the world. What then happens is that they take on the role of ensuring you do not experience certain things, stopping us from surrendering to who we really are, the stillness, the peace of just being.

This process is essentially simple. It is important to let go of what we know about consciousness to relax the mind and open the heart so response comes from a pure place rather than an intellectual assessment.

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”

Albert Einstein

Creative Visualisation & Imagery

Creative Visualization is the ability to use the imagination, see images in our minds and make them come true. If we add concentration and feelings, it becomes a great creative power that makes things happen. Used in the right way, visualization can bring changes into our lives. The thought is the matrix or blueprint; the feelings provide the energy, the “electricity”. This is the power of creative visualization. This is the power that can alter our environment and circumstances, cause events to happen, attract money, possessions, work and love, change habits and improve the health. It is a great mind power. It is the power behind every success.

Explore creative visualisation and its endless possibilities to develop awareness, connection and resolution. Create, connect and re-establish relationships with internal archetypes for example inner child, higher self, soul communication. A guided visualisation is a simple but powerful effective method for resolving deep issues and support growth.

“It is through healing our inner child, our inner children, by grieving the wounds that we suffered, that we can change our behavior patterns and clear our emotional process. We can release the grief with its pent-up rage, shame, terror, and pain from those feeling places which exist within us.“

DIRECT EXPERIENCE

The goal of Direct Experience is to increase the ability to be psychologically present – i.e. aware, attentive, open to, and engaged in your experience; And with this the ability to control your behavior.

What is the essence of problem solving?
Problem = Something we don’t want
Solution = Figure out how to change it, get rid of it, or avoid it

This approach works well in the external world, but when we try this with our own unwanted thoughts, feelings, memories etc… it creates problems:

Experiential Avoidance (Please note that not all forms are unhealthy) :

Simple definition – trying to avoid, suppress, or get rid of unwanted experiences, even when it’s harmful, costly, or ineffective to do so

Instead of encouraging clients to use more clever ways to fight and win this war with their own thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, Direct Experience helps clients step out of this war altogether.

Acceptance-based treatments attempt to alter the impact of emotions and cognitions by stopping the struggle with them rather than by attempting to change their form or frequency.

An acceptance approach does not abandon direct change efforts: It simply targets them toward more readily changeable domains, such as overt behavior or life situations, rather than personal history or automatic thoughts and feelings (Russ Harris 2007)

“Awareness of present experience with acceptance.“

MAPPING ONE’S LIFESTREAM

Identifying primary issues and their point of creation and how they recreate themselves throughout a lifetime and the psyche’s need for resolution.

Most of us are addicted to some fear or another, whether it be the fear of: not having enough, abandonment, not being good enough, losing control, failure, success, not being able to cope etc. These can be seen as your fundamental feelings, that which drives the need for your strategies, reactions, thoughts, body sensations and the like.

There are many possibilities in mapping your lifestream and I am happy to guide you to do your own and find the keys they are important in your life.

VOICE DIALOGUE

Voice Dialogue is a powerful, transformational technique which expands your self-awareness and gives you more choice and balance within yourself and in your life. In essence, it makes you more fully conscious of all the aspects of your humanity, be they spiritual, instinctual, materially focused, service-oriented, emotional, rational, parental and childlike.

The results are better relationships, increased self-acceptance and self-esteem, an ability to access more of the talents and abilities you have within you, and a connection to your essential nature. To be able to choose which selves to express, rather than have the selves choose for you. (H. & S.Stone)

In order for one to integrate and be whole, what is taken in must be assimilated.

Assimilation is the process of experiencing what is to be taken in, deconstructing it, keeping what is useful, and discarding what is not. For example, the process of assimilation allows the listener to select and keep only what is useful from a lecture she or he attends.

“Thought alone can completely change the body.”

Candace Pert PhD