I often get asked: “What is Holistic Counselling?” Or “What do you mean by Holistic?”
When people seek out a counsellor they are generally experiencing some form of suffering or stuckness and feel they have exhausted all their options. They may feel very broken, like the world is against them and helpless to help themselves. Or they may feel like they aren’t a very nice person or it’s not safe to be them and want to be someone or someway else. Whatever their individual experience, there is a sense they are stuck in a ground hog day and have no idea how to get out. For many Counselling offers a place to be heard and seen, maybe for the first time ever.
In addition to allowing for this holding and supportive space, Holistic Counselling aims for wholeness in the person, working to reintegrate disowned parts. The under lying belief is that we all have deep wisdom and that the seeds of healing can be found through following our symptoms or experience of suffering. In practice this means it is counselling that is client focused, leans into the clients symptoms and experiences with curiosity and explores them using embodied methods such as drawing, movement, bodily sensations, internal imagery etc. I am trained in Process Oriented Psychology or Processwork which is an offshoot of Jungian Psychology developed by Arnold Mindell. The benefit is that during sessions a client will have an embodied experience of the changes they would like to see and that all tools are unique to the client, making uptake and ownership more likely. I also believe that this work is very empowering as it teaches clients how to access their inner wisdom.
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