Welcome to Counselling & Psychotherapy via whatsapp and zoom
email: jane.barclay@jbcounselling.co.uk
Essentially, the work has already started – with you recognising the need for help, then searching and selecting one or more therapists to ‘check out’. Next comes the courageous step of making contact.
Your concern/s and distress may include:
your relationship with your self: disturbing feelings: of depression – disconnection – helplessness – abandonment – of ‘something’s missing’ – disappointment – of let down/betrayal
overwhelming feelings: of anxiety – grief – jealousy – rage – anger – guilt – shame
compulsive / addictive / out-of-control behaviours: eating – starving – spending – hoarding – gambling – work/busyness – self-harming
dislike / disgust of your body
experience of abuse: in childhood, in adulthood: emotional – physical – sexual
suicidal thoughts
your relationship with your partner… issues of intimacy
your relationship with your parent/s, with your children, with friends, with colleagues
separation from either or both parents in childhood: due to death – to divorce – to adoption – to fostering – to being in care – to imprisonment – to being sent to Boarding School
separation from children: due to death – to divorce – to adoption – to fostering – to having children in care – to imprisonment – to selecting Boarding School
My aim is to help you know better what’s happening, how you feel and what you need and want in order to live more satisfyingly – and at the same time recognising and respecting fear and resistance to this very process of exploring more deeply, however this may manifest. This way of working is collaborative and based on the quality of the clearly-boundaried therapeutic relationship that grows between us.
Becoming more self-aware is empowering and fosters a sense of inner security and resource. Confidence to negotiate and set boundaries increases. Clearer connection with your feelings, needs and wants promotes a stronger sense of your self, together with a more secure sense of belonging and connection with others – a way towards feeling more alive, more ‘in’ the world.
My session fees are £70 per hour. Concessionary rates can be discussed.
TRAUMA THERAPY
I have trained with Babette Rothschild (author of The Body Remembers, Norton 2000) in Trauma Therapy and work with clients to resolve and integrate past traumatic experiences that, left unresolved, continue to interfere with the present and inhibit a sense of full ‘aliveness’.
A traumatic experience, in whatever form, is one in which someone experiences what’s happening – whether a single event or an on-going situation – as life-threatening, whether physically or existentially (erosion of ‘self’). Witnessing threat to another equally evokes trauma responses.
Symptoms of stress arise in the aftermath if physiological arousal needed to activate the Fight, Flight or Freeze response is neither discharged nor returns to balance (‘relaxed alertness’ as opposed to ‘hyper-vigilance’).
High-arousal body sensations, long-term and relentless become debilitating, and account for many strategies that attempt to escape or numb them. Addictions and obsessive/compulsive behaviours, risk-seeking, risk-aversion, compliance, ‘fawning’, as well as much unexplained physical pain, explosions of rage or chronic anxiety, can be understood as signposts to unresolved trauma – experiences that remain split-off and ‘forgotten’.
The factor common to all trauma experience is terror and helplessness. The need to tell is instinctive. Beng heard is crucial. Being disbelieved or not taken seriously turns the story into a secret, silenced by shame and distrust. Hence avoidance and/or denial that can last a lifetime – sadly, to the detriment of self and the wider world.
I offer respectful, non-invasive attention to those who want, though fear, to tell. I work to empower clients to soothe heightened arousal and build resources, to identify patterns and strategies that once served survival but now prolong suffering, and carefully facilitate the process of remobilising and discharging constricted energies – replacing helplessness with empowerment.
‘It’s ok to be angry, it’s ok to be sad,
It’s ok to be frightened, no need to pretend,
It’s ok to be silent, to sit here and cry,
You don’t ask me questions, you don’t ask me why…
Layer by layer you help me dig down
Freeing truths deeply hidden, to big to know alone,
No advice, sorting out, no scorn, no blame,
You welcome all of me, my guilt and my shame.
Little by little, I dared to trust,
To breathe, to look up, recover heart that I’d lost,
To rage, cry, scream, to dare to be held,
Then to love, to enjoy being me at last.’
I wrote these words during my training to describe ‘The Role of a Counsellor’, and some years later gave them to my therapist as part of my goodbye and thank you.
