What is Therapy?

The term therapy is used to describe face to face talking with individuals or groups, which may help clients in the following ways: personal development, crisis support, psychotherapeutic care, guidance, coaching or problem solving.  Clients are offered the opportunity to explore, discover and clarify their issues within a safe, non-judgmental relationship. 

Therapy is not about giving advice.  It is about providing a safe and confidential environment in which you can explore your feelings and options without being judged.  Therapy can help you to move towards a deeper understanding of self, identify new goals and help to develop more effective and constructive ways of coping with issues, which may have seemed unmanageable.

What is the difference between Psychotherapy and Counselling?

The terms 'counselling' and 'psychotherapy' are often used interchangeably and, in practice refer to very similar experiences for the client.  The terms cover a wide range of approaches, with the trained person having spent from a few months to several years getting their qualifications. Technically, however, there are differences.

Counselling tends to work in a relatively brief and problem-based way focusing for example on particular problems, symptoms or relationships.

Psychotherapy, generally speaking, is a longer-term treatment, which focuses more on gaining insight and working through unresolved feelings that are preventing you from being at peace with yourself on a deeper more unconscious level.

One way of differentiating between psychotherapy and counselling is to think of a continuum with counselling at one end, psychotherapy at the other, and an overlap between the two in the middle.  In reality both these processes overlap and often do in the sessions.