One To One Support

Counsellors and Psychotherapists play a crucial role in improving the health and wellbeing of our society. They help people to talk about their feelings, think about their choices or their behaviour, and make positive changes in their lives.

Counselling provides a safe, impartial and confidential space in which to explore feelings. It enables the exploration of loss, grief, anger and the emotional impact that sexual trauma has had.

Your Psychotherapist will be the same person that you work with throughout your time at Break the Silence and appointments are usually offered on a fortnightly basis.

Counselling can be done at a pace that suits you. If you begin counselling support and feel it is too soon, or that you need to take a break, then we will understand. You can suspend support and come back to us when you feel ready to continue.

We maintain your confidentiality throughout unless there is a serious risk of harm to yourself or others or where it involves a current Child Protection issue, where we are bound to follow local authority guidelines.

There are various therapeutic choices which we offer that can help and we will discuss these with you – see the list below.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) can help you manage problems by enabling you to recognise how your thoughts can affect your feelings and behaviour. CBT combines a cognitive approach (examining your thoughts) with a behavioural approach (the things you do). It aims to break overwhelming problems down into smaller parts, making them easier to manage.

Compassion-focused therapy (CFT) aims to help promote mental and emotional healing by encouraging people in treatment to be compassionate toward themselves and other people. Compassion, both toward the self and toward others, is an emotional response believed by many to be an essential aspect of well-being.

Person-centred therapy, also known as person-centred counselling or client-centred counselling, is a humanistic approach that deals with the ways in which individuals perceive themselves consciously.

Pluralistic practice represents a flexible and responsive approach to therapeutic support that emphasises the strengths and resources of Clients and the Communities and relationships that sustain them. Key principles of pluralistic practice include a commitment to a process of dialogue and shared decision-making through which the knowledge and life experience of both client and therapist can be combined, and respect for the creative possibilities associated with open-ness to differences between individuals and across cultural traditions.

Integrative therapy, or integrative counselling is a combined approach to psychotherapy that brings together different elements of specific therapies. Integrative counselling maintains the idea that there are many ways in which human psychology can be explored and understood – no one theory holds the answer.

We all have a natural process to deal with processing and resolving life experiences that are normal everyday events, sometimes even upsetting or disturbing ones. We think about them, dream about them and talk about them. As we do this we connect these events with other parts of our lives and create memories that help to make the story of our lives. We know ‘that was then and this is now’ and over time the memory becomes less vivid.

However we know that more significant events can occur in a person’s life that result in psychological trauma. One way to understand trauma is when the natural way of dealing with an event fails and the memory of this event or events is just too big, it becomes stuck in the ‘right now’ part of our brain meaning we keep reliving it as if it is happening now, it can’t be filed away. This can happen because the experience is so terrible it cannot be understood or it could be a way of defending the person from fully taking in the disturbing experience. These events are then not fully processed. This is very distressing and the person is thrown back into the memory in often unexpected ways; smells, colours, music, photographs, images, touch. It feels as if it is happening now.

Here at Break the Silence, therapists can offer an approach to therapy that works to help ‘unstick’ these difficult memories. EMDR helps people to be able to think about events or experiences that have been very upsetting without getting ‘sucked back into’ the memory. We ‘distract’ the brain by getting you to move parts of your body, maybe your eyes from side to side , or alternating hand taps on a surface or your own legs. By doing this both sides of your brain have to work and your brain has to pay attention to the movement so it doesn’t get so absorbed by the memory and the feelings that go along side it. When the brain is helped to pay a little more attention to the experience without being overwhelmed it is then able to file it away like a normal memory, one in which the ‘volume’ of the feelings and sensations are turned all the way down. Once it is filed away properly it doesn’t ‘fall out’ unexpectedly, it also doesn’t get mixed up in lots of other memories without warning.

WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU START WORKING WITH EMDR

EMDR, like any therapy, relies heavily on you and your therapist having a good relationship so initial sessions concentrate on getting to know you and understanding what has brought you to our service. We make sure that we understand how events are affecting you and we help you to understand your coping strategies – the ways in which you deal with life when things are tricky or difficult. Sometimes we spend time helping you to develop stronger, healthier ways of dealing with stress and introducing you to some exercises that help your nervous system settle down after you have been ‘processing’ upsetting memories in session.

When it’s the right time to start processing the trauma memories themselves you and the therapist will sit facing each other either in person or using laptop/tablet ( a bigger screen is better) and the therapist will use a variety of different ways to stimulate both sides of your brain e.g asking you to follow their finger while they move their hand from left to right, following a moving dot on the screen or maybe just asking you to tap your hands on the table in front of you or across your body. We work with the memories that you want to deal with initially and we encourage you to just notice what is coming up for you , memories, sensations, thoughts – there is no right or wrong, we let your brain just sort through what it needs to and we help you to notice that. Once you have worked through your memory we check back in with how your body is feeling and if your brain and your body are feeling settled and safe then we can stop. Sometimes this happens all in one session , sometimes it takes longer than that. EMDR is not designed to make you forget things, therapy like this is just one way we here at Break the Silence can help you to get better at understanding what happened to you and to heal.

There is a lot of information here and we don’t expect you to remember it – you can ask as we go along. There is a short video here that you can watch as well if you would like to.

This is a video about EMDR that you might find helpful. Click to open