About Counselling

This may be the first time you are considering seeing a therapist or you may have had other counselling experiences in the past. If this is your first time you are planning to see a therapist, or even if you have previous experience seeing a therapist, many people have questions about what to expect.

In your first session, I will be asking questions about you and your life to get a better idea of what is bringing you into counselling. Some questions will be about your personal health and wellness history, others will be about your current situation and the things that are holding you back or getting in the way of moving towards who and what is important to you. If at any point you would like to add something that hasn’t come up in my questions, you are always invited to do so. This session is structured to help me to better understand the issue(s) bringing you to counselling and in my opinion there is no better person equipped to help me form this understanding than you.

By the end of the first session, I will reflect back some ideas about what I am hearing you would like us to focus on in our work together. The focus for our work should reflect your experience. I will regularly check in during this and future sessions to make sure my understanding reflect your experience as you experience it. If I’ve missed something, interpreted something that wasn’t intended, or added something in a way that doesn’t work for you, let me know. This reflection is meant to organize and summarize what I have been hearing to form a few topics of focus. These topics will give our work together structure, and break our work together into manageable parts.

With these topics in mind, in future sessions, we will get to work. How we work together will be primarily selected based on the issues that are coming up, the therapeutic approaches that make sense to me and that I have been trained to use, and where you find yourself in terms of readiness to make some changes. For more information on my therapeutic style see About My Practice.

For our work together to have the most benefit for you, it is important that the pace of our work together feel comfortable for you. I will check in regularly to make sure the pace feels right and that the issues we are focusing on are still those you would like to focus on (as it is not uncommon that these may change throughout the course of our work together).