Compassionate counselling and psychotherapy for healing and growth
Counselling and psychotherapy offer us the opportunity to become unstuck. When relationships or personal problems become too much, having the space to talk with a trained professional enables us to find new ways to live our lives. Through my counselling work with both children and adults to date, I have experience of working with clients in processing and healing from a number of issues, including
Anxiety
Anger
Depression
Trauma
Bereavement and loss
Relationship difficulties/breakdowns
Self-esteem issues
Dislocation/disenchantment
Pervasive/obsessive compulsive thoughts and behaviours
Physical/psychological/spiritual abuse
I offer one-to-one appointments with adult clients, in which I seek to establish a trusting, stable, and reliable relationship with you. Here, you can feel safe to explore what is going on inside you and experience what it is like to be yourself in new ways. Along with my thirst to understand you and to facilitate you in helping yourself, I bring years of experience of providing counselling and psychotherapy at both Place2Be and Hope Counselling to a diverse range of clients — from primary school children feeling lost and angry, to younger adults caught in cycles of addiction and guilt, to older clients wishing to put the ghosts of childhood trauma to rest.
I hold a COSCA-certified Postgraduate Diploma in Counselling from the University of Edinburgh, where my training combined psychodynamic and person-centred approaches to counselling and psychotherapy. And I’m a registered member of the BACP.
If this sounds like what you’re looking for, we can arrange a free initial consultation. This will not commit you to working with me. Please email me on contact@michaelwoodcounselling.com or, alternatively, use the contact form on this website:
Importantly, there is no hard-and-fast nor agreed-upon distinction between “counselling” and “psychotherapy” in the UK. From my professional and personal experience, I believe that there is no difference between the two terms in practice. I therefore use the two terms interchangeably. But I am aware that individuals seeking “counselling”, “psychotherapy”, “therapy”, or more, may approach their psychological wellbeing with one or more of these terms — or, indeed, more — in mind, and that is why I couple them throughout my website.
For more information on counselling and psychotherapy, please consider visiting the website of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), the professional body to which I belong and to whose core ethical and professional standards I adhere.
For more information about how I work and what our appointments might look like, please scroll down.
What is relational psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy?
I describe myself as a relational psychodynamic counsellor and psychotherapist. By “relational”, I mean that I believe that the nature, quality, and shape of a therapeutic relationship is at the heart of counselling and psychotherapy. That is, we meet as two human beings who navigate a relationship together that becomes central in our understanding of how you relate to people, places, and objects in the world outside the counselling room.
By “psychodynamic”, I am not claiming to be a psychoanalyst — like Freud, Jung, Klein, and many of the names quoted across this website — but I refer to my conviction, drawn from classical psychoanalysis, that our psychological (and physical) lives are steered to no small extent by unconscious mental processes. Our relationships with our environment (and, primarily, the people within it) shape our lives from the moment we are born until the day we die. They do this by resulting in unconscious patterns, ways of being of which we are only barely aware, that affect how we understand ourselves, how we understand others, and how we deal with all sorts of different types of people and situations. When these patterns are disturbed (e.g., through the loss of a loved one), or when they become too entrenched (e.g., when we can’t help seeing ourselves as worthless), we can be unsettled, agitated, and distressed.
Finding how these patterns affect you, how you came to view yourself accordingly, or how your own self-understanding has been crushed is central to psychodynamic work. Fundamental to this, however, is that you do so within a relationship with someone whose own capacity to respond to you in a new, not yet experienced way can, in turn, help you to come unstuck and experience yourself and your surroundings anew.
What can I expect from counselling and psychotherapy?
I believe that what can help us to become unstuck is being in a therapeutic relationship with another person who provides care, empathy, and discretion while being a whole, honest, and personal human being. It is an actual relationship that heals.
Counselling and psychotherapy with me will usually consist of weekly appointments for an hour at a time. But meeting more or less frequently and for particular periods of time can be arranged according to your own therapeutic needs and your personal goals. We can meet in-person or online (via Zoom), depending on what is most convenient for you.
Our appointments will consist of us forming and sustaining a relationship in which I listen, ask questions, and together we wonder about what you’re feeling and thinking. I won’t tell you what’s wrong, and I won’t tell you what to do differently — I believe that no one can have that power over another. Instead, I place value on you and your experiences, both past and present; I offer you an open, non-judgemental, and non-discriminatory ear in a confidential space; I seek to understand you, what you’ve been through, and what you’re going through. Depending on the nature and duration of our work together, I will largely leave it up to you to bring what is front and centre of what you’re thinking about and feeling: I believe that, often, it is the things we stumble upon and find that can be much more meaningful and significant than those things we set out to look for; and I believe in your innate ability to heal yourself through our relationship.
Our work together will require that you can open to me about everything and anything that emerges. This might range from the mundane, everyday things that just get on your nerves to those things that might, at first, seem uncomfortable to bring — indeed, you might not have been able to talk to someone about them before. This sounds like a lot to ask, and it is. But we work on building a foundation of mutual trust and respect, upon which our therapeutic relationship can be built. And depending on your goals from counselling and psychotherapy, that can be a relationship that lasts for as long as you need it.
If this sounds like the sort of counselling and psychotherapy you would like, please get in touch to arrange a free consultation.