Individual Counselling
People come for individual counselling for many different reasons. You may be struggling with anxiety, stress, grief, confidence, a relationship difficulty or a significant change in your life. You may feel stuck without being able to explain exactly why. Or perhaps life is functioning reasonably well, but you want to understand yourself better and make more deliberate choices about how you live.
A large part of my individual counselling work is concerned with the relationship we have with ourselves.
We all adapt as we grow up. We learn which behaviours are rewarded, what keeps us safe, what is expected of us and which parts of ourselves are easier to show than others. Those adaptations often serve an important purpose. The difficulty comes when we continue living by rules that were developed many years ago but no longer suit the person we are today.
Understanding Yourself More Fully
Counselling provides an opportunity to notice some of those patterns and ask where they came from.
You may have become the person who always copes, the one who avoids conflict, the person who needs to keep everybody happy, or someone who finds it difficult to trust, ask for help or believe that your own needs are important.
These ways of functioning are rarely random. They usually make more sense when we understand the experiences and relationships in which they developed.
Understanding them does not mean blaming the past. It means having a clearer idea of why you respond as you do today and deciding whether those responses are still useful.
Individuation and Authentic Living
An important concept in some of my work is individuation.
Individuation is the ongoing process of developing a clearer sense of who you are, separate from the roles, expectations and identities that have accumulated around you.
We can spend many years being the responsible one, the successful one, the accommodating partner, the good parent, the strong one or the person everybody relies on. These roles may be genuine parts of us, but they are not necessarily the whole of us.
Individual counselling can create space to explore what matters to you, which parts of yourself may have been neglected and what living more authentically might mean in practice.
For me, authentic living is not about disregarding responsibilities or doing whatever you feel like doing. It is about knowing yourself well enough to make choices that are increasingly consistent with your values rather than being driven primarily by fear, approval or expectation.
Inner Child Work
Some individual counselling may involve inner child work.
Our earlier experiences can influence how we understand ourselves and what we expect from relationships long after childhood has ended. Experiences of rejection, inconsistency, criticism, abandonment, exclusion or having to grow up too quickly can affect how we respond when similar emotions are triggered later in life.
Inner child work is not about remaining focused on childhood. It is about recognising that some adult reactions may have roots in much earlier experiences.
Once those connections become clearer, we can begin responding to ourselves differently in the present.
Shadow Work
I also draw on ideas associated with shadow work.
All of us have aspects of ourselves that we have learned not to show. These might include anger, vulnerability, ambition, sexuality, neediness, assertiveness, sadness or even confidence.
Sometimes the qualities we reject most strongly in ourselves are the very ones we have learned are unacceptable.
Shadow work involves becoming curious about these parts rather than immediately judging or suppressing them. The purpose is not to act on every feeling or impulse. It is to understand ourselves more completely and decide more consciously how we want to respond.
Self-Compassion
Many people find it much easier to be compassionate towards other people than towards themselves.
They can understand somebody else’s mistakes, recognise the pressure another person is under and forgive another person’s imperfections, while speaking to themselves in a way they would never speak to somebody they care about.
Developing self-compassion does not mean avoiding responsibility or excusing behaviour that needs to change.
It means being able to look at yourself honestly without treating yourself as the enemy.
That can make it easier to set boundaries, make different choices, take responsibility and begin changing patterns that no longer serve you.
Becoming More Fully Yourself
The purpose of this work is not to manufacture a new version of you.
It is to understand yourself more fully, including the parts you value and the parts you may find more difficult to accept.
As that understanding develops, there is often more room for choice. You become less governed by automatic reactions or old expectations and better able to decide what kind of life, relationships and relationship with yourself you want to build.
I offer individual counselling in Hout Bay, Cape Town, as well as online counselling across South Africa.
You do not need to arrive with a diagnosis, a crisis or a perfectly formed reason for coming.
Wanting to understand yourself better is reason enough.