Counselling and psychotherapy

Individual and group counselling and psychotherapy services 
We provide long-term and short-term individual services for adults, children and young people. Where it is considered appropriate clients may be offered a place in a program of group-therapy sessions.

If you have been referred to us,or you think you may may benefit from counselling you can start the process by contacting our referral team. Our referral team assesses each new client and assigns him or her to an appropriate counsellor or psychotherapist. Therafter they normally meet in a consulting room at the centre at fixed, agreed times that are convenient for the client.

Counselling
Counselling takes place when a counsellor sees a client in a private and confidential setting to explore a difficulty the client is having, distress they may be experiencing or perhaps their dissatisfaction with life, or loss of a sense of direction and purpose. It is always at the request of the client as no one can properly be 'sent' for counselling.
 
By listening attentively and patiently the counsellor can begin to perceive the difficulties from the client's point of view and can help them to see things more clearly, possibly from a different perspective. Counselling is a way of enabling choice or change or of reducing confusion. It does not involve giving advice or directing a client to take a particular course of action. Counsellors do not judge or exploit their clients in any way.

Psychotherapy
A psychotherapist works with people who have emotional, behavioural, psychological or mental difficulties. This form of therapy involves the provision of a formal and professional relationship within which patients/clients can profitably explore difficult, and often painful, emotions and experiences. These may include feelings of anxiety, depression, trauma, or perhaps the loss of meaning of one's life. The work is mainly to encourage the client to talk and explore their feelings, beliefs and thoughts, and often, their childhood. It is a process which seeks to help the person gain an increased capacity for choice, through which the individual becomes more autonomous and self determined.

We offer a range of individual and group psychotherapy services delivered by associates who are either fully-qualified psychotherapists or experienced psychotherapists at the final stages of their training. We provide mainly long-term psychotherapy services which may involve meeting more than once a week.

CBT and REBT
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) refers to the pragmatic combination of concepts and techniques from cognitive and behaviour therapies, common in clinical practice. It is a kind of psychotherapy used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, phobias, and other forms of mental disorder. It involves recognising distorted thinking and learning to replace it with more realistic substitute ideas. Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) is a form of cognitive therapy that identifies underlying assumptions and patterns of thinking linked to negative unwanted emotions and challenges these.

Some CASSEL centre staff and student associates are experienced CBT and REBT practitioners and who work regularly with clients using these techniques at the centre. We are expanding our capability and we now have several staff who are fully trained in CBT and join with other CASSEL associates to deliver this service.