About me
Hi my name is Janet, I am a qualified counselling psychotherapist working with adults who have various emotional difficulties. Which can include; anxiety, stress, and depression the impact this can have on our family, our work life, and the relationships we have with everyone around us.
We can work together, to find ways to get through the painful experiences and the cause of these feelings this could be loss and grief, or trauma of any kind past or present. I can assure you I will treat you with the respect, empathy and confidentially.
My background
Along with my qualification, I have many personal life experiences and understand the strength it takes to ask for help, to open up and talk about your innermost thoughts. I also understand the bravery of others and the daily challenges they overcome to make a new start and help build a brighter outlook for the next chapter. As a Samaritan, I witnessed the despair people can experience when they feel no one else can help. there is always help I employ a person centred approach and a non judgemental attitude and understand the courage it takes to reach out, as a member of the national counselling society I work to an ethical framework.
You may be wondering how can counselling can help?
I believe that talking about our problems and issues can take the fear away. Then it helps to start your new day better than the one yesterday, which gives you strength and hope for the future.
Training, qualifications & experience
- Advanced diploma - counselling psychotherapy
- Diploma - Hypnotherapy
- Member of the national counselling society
- Member of the professional standards authority.
Pluralistic therapy has been designed as a framework to allow therapists and clients to work together to find the best way of addressing clients’ concerns, using ideas and methods from both the therapy literature and the client’s life experience. The basic principle of pluralistic therapy is that different people are helped by different processes and activities at different times, and that the best way of deciding on how therapy should proceed is to engage the client in a process of shared decision-making. Given that therapists may be committed to certain assumptions about what will help, and that clients may find it hard (at least at the outset) to be clear about what they think would be helpful or unhelpful for them, pluralistic practice is organised around a specific set of procedures for collaborative working.
At the heart of pluralistic therapy is the intention to be as clear as possible about what the client wants from therapy: the client’s goals.9 This principle is articulated in sensitivity to the ‘directionality’ of the client – a concept that embraces a broader appreciation of goals being embedded within a sense of movement (or stuckness) in relation to a preferred future.10 Goal-informed therapy can also be facilitated through the use of ‘goals forms’ that allow the client to write down in their own words their understanding of what they want, to review and revise goals on a regular basis, and to track goal attainment on a week-by-week basis.10 Having established the broad goals of therapy, the next step is to break these objectives down into a set of achievable tasks. For example, a client who wishes to ‘enjoy life and be less depressed all the time’ might work toward such an objective through activities including coming to terms with feelings of loss, adopting a more healthy lifestyle and diet, developing more satisfying and meaningful relationships with friends, and reducing levels of undermining internal self-talk.11 Typically, clients in pluralistic therapy pursue more than one task at a time. Once therapeutic tasks or areas of focus have been identified, it is helpful to explore the methods or techniques that might be deployed to facilitate their completion. For example, with some clients it might be preferable to come to terms with loss by engaging in a process of empathic, exploratory conversation with their therapist. For others, art techniques, two-chair work, or reading a self-help book might be more helpful. When clients are encouraged to share their own ideas and preferences around what might be helpful, they sometimes come up with suggestions that readily map onto therapy techniques with which their counsellor is familiar. However, they may also identify strategies that are based in their everyday life experience, such as going on pilgrimage, listening to emotionally moving music, or doing some gardening. In pluralistic therapy, these activities are described as ‘cultural resources’ and are treated as precious gifts that embody the capacity of the client for self-healing and constructive engagement with the wider world.
Pluralistic therapy
In pluralistic therapy, the process of seeking explicit agreement around goals, tasks and methods is fluid and dynamic. Even if the therapist uses written forms, these are only meaningful in the context of ongoing conversation and dialogue that aims to ensure maximum client-therapist alignment around the purpose of therapy and the development of shared understanding. It is a process that is underpinned by a relational ethical stance that emphasises the need for the therapist to care for the client in ways that respect the client’s uniqueness as a person.
In addition to initiating conversations around goals, tasks and methods, there are three further skills and strategies that are distinctive to pluralistic therapy. At an early stage in therapy, the therapist brings together the different threads of shared decision-making by using a form of collaborative case formulation that involves visual mapping, by client and therapist working together, of the client’s difficulties and goals, their strengths and resources, key life events, and possible ways of moving forward.13 The therapist intentionally uses metacommunication (such as clarifying, challenging, self-monitoring, process monitoring and questioning), as a means of checking out moment-bymoment alignment of client and therapist purposes, and establishing a way of talking that is reflective, authentic and actively takes account of the intentions of both parties. The therapist also makes use of process and outcome feedback and monitoring tools, to provide the client with a scaffolding and predictable routine, through which they can convey their sense of whether therapy is working for them, and how it might need to change direction or focus. As well as widely used outcome measures such as CORE, pluralistic practice also incorporates qualitative feedback instruments and scales that allow the client to comment directly on specific aspects of the therapist’s style.
