Taking the first step

Counselling is a therapeutic process that aims to support and enhance the emotional and psychological wellbeing of an individual. Our role is to facilitate and create positive change that improves how you respond and interact with yourself and others.

There's a common perception that individuals only go seek counselling if they're experiencing severe or extreme mental health issues. That's not really the case. Everybody can benefit from counselling. In fact counselling can support a wide range of people, from highly functioning professionals to dire cases of individuals that face extreme emotional difficulties.

During the counselling process, your counsellor will collaborate with you to identify your goals and what you'd like to get out of the session. Throughout the journey, your counsellor will facilitate sessions that explore your personal growth, development, and self-understanding. They'll also work with you to develop an action plan to help you navigate through the emotional moment, providing you with the tools for you to apply in your everyday routine.

The most important point to recognise is that each of us have very specific approaches to supporting your psychological and emotional wellbeing. A psychiatrist is a trained medical doctor that can prescribe medication as a course of treatment for diagnosing and intervening psychological difficulties. A clinical psychologist is a trained professional that treat emotional and mental suffering with behavioural intervention.

It's very normal for an individual to ask this question, especially for those that have never attended or experienced a counselling session before.

There's more that takes place beneath the conversations that counsellors have with their clients. Because of our trained knowledge and skillsets, we have expertise in working with you to identify additional meaningful insights that inform your behaviour and emotional response. We provide a psychologically and emotionally safe space for you to validate your story without the burden of pre-existing influence from relationships or the community.

Finally, we're objective-driven - our conversations are purposeful and aimed to support your journey towards positive change that improves your wellbeing. All of our questions have meaning and strategic intent, to understand your story and to help you move forward in living a more healthier, positive life.

As a client, there are many ways for you to recognise that a counselling session is supporting your journey and bringing positive outcomes to your wellbeing.

First, you'll start to feel comfortable with your counsellor and the conversations you're having with them. It's important that you feel psychologically safe and that there's a chemistry you're able to have with your counsellor. If you're able to feel more open and honest with your stories and feelings, then that's a good sign.

Second, you'll start to learn more about yourself. Part of the counselling journey involves reflection, opportunities where you'll start to review how you respond and interact with yourself and the world around you. If you're gaining a new perspective and starting to learn new parts of who you are, then it means that the counselling sessions are helping you facilitate these learning experiences. This in turn is helping you provide more opportunities for positive change.

Finally, you'll start to achieve your counselling goal and navigate through your current difficult or moment more effectively. It's important to remember that every counselling journey has an end point, and the role of the counsellor is to provide you with the support, tools, and skillset to navigate through these moments effectively and positively. When you feel that you're able to be more confident in managing these moments on your own, then your counselling sessions are doing its intended purpose.

After you've aligned your counselling goals, it will take a few sessions for you to work together with your counsellor to explore and identify what it takes for you to be able to navigate through your current moment or difficulty. If you personally feel like you're able to navigate through your challenges with your newfound growth and skillset, then that should be a good indicator of your capacity to solve the problem.

But we also want to be clear with something - not all problems can be solved. Some are rather dependent on things that our beyond your control - things such as your boss's personality, financial situation, or pre-existing family dynamics. Sometimes these factors can be too much to bear, or too difficult to bring change with a single individual. That's why it's often less about whether the problems are solved, but more about whether you as a client have the capacity, and the emotional stability, to navigate through it without giving yourself additional harm.

We'd like to think we're different in the way that we provide our counselling services to our clients.

As a counselling agency, we're quite young and therefore have a new perspective and openness to a wide range of moments and things that are happening around us - from sexual orientation and gender, to cyber-bullying and newfound parenthood.

We want to learn more about these milestones and how they impact our emotional and mental wellbeing.We embrace technology and how it can compliment the wellbeing and delivery of our counselling practice. Our sessions are primarily done via video conferences to help cater to your busy schedules and privacy. We also understand what it means to live online, we know how much harm it can bring, but also how it can help connect us with helpful information and new connections.

Finally, we're invested in storytelling and the broader conversation of mental health in popular culture. Every paid counselling session helps fund projects that positively represent mental wellbeing. We love to create content because we believe they help us feel empowered, more vulnerable, and more confident to bring positive change to our lives. And more importantly - they help us feel less alone.