Individual Counselling
In individual counselling, clients learn to replace unsuccessful patterns of thinking and behaving with more effective … and healthy responses to the difficulties of life.
About Individual Counselling
Reaching out for help takes courage. Prospective clients typically wish to feel happier in themselves or with others. Whether it is a result of trauma, anxiety, grief or other difficult experiences. Sara believes individuals are doing the best they can to get what they yearn for. With new skills, awareness and knowledge, reaching their dreams becomes possible. Sara sees her role as collaboratively working with clients to identify their strengths and positive intentions so they can understand what they are doing well. Then, she helps them develop the missing “pieces” in their repertoire so they can feel more alive and more truly themselves.
Often clients believe that there is something wrong with them or wonder if they are crazy. They cannot make sense of how they respond or why others appear happier or more successful than they are. From the first session, Sara engages with clients to help them understand and make sense of their behaviours, thoughts or feelings.
Using up to date evidence-based techniques, Sara helps clients learn more helpful behaviours. Sara teaches clients how their current behaviours might be responses to threat (fight or flight), stress, grief, childhood/ current trauma, or their individual attachment style. Any of these predispositions or triggers can interfere with how we develop our relationships with ourselves or others.
Sara’s central modality of working with clients is Internal Family Systems (IFS) which is a non-pathologizing and evidence-based method of looking at how we respond to difficult experiences, traumatic events or our own unwelcome thoughts and feelings. IFS helps clients bring harmony to their internal system so they can feel calmer and regulated. Sara’s belief aligns with the IFS approach that every individual has within them the key to their own healing. Sara’s role is to facilitate the unlocking of their inherent resources and wisdom.
What to Expect
Sara believes her job is be a trusted companion in your change journey and help you understand and respond with compassion to your learned patterns of behaviour, not to analyze or give advice.
The first session is an opportunity for the new client to describe what they are experiencing and set out what they are hoping for.
Collaboratively, Sara and her client map out what the counselling will look like and she also allows time for questions and fine-tuning. Her intent is to create a safe and compassionate environment.
Clients are helped to understand their own family of parts (internal thoughts, feelings and behaviours) and how they evolved over time and what their purpose is. IFS holds that all behaviours can be understood through the lens of a positive intent even if the actual thoughts and behaviours can be extreme or unhelpful. This approach helps clients understand that when these behavours were adapted, it was appropriate for that time of their life (often childhood and adolescence), even if they are maladaptive now.
As a body informed therapist, Sara integrates her IFS approach to help clients better understand what is going on somatically (sensations like tension/pain, stomach upsets) This holistic approach allows Sara to not only take and understand what the client is telling her but how their experience has locked in their body. Clients learn how these memories that are somatically coded and repeated can be at the root of their distress and may also be learned reactions to their experiences.
Clients develop an understanding of how their systems integrated as a result of their experiences and over time with the help of Sara’s guidance to bring a sense of harmony, peace and collaboration to their thoughts and behaviours so they can respond internally and to others in a kinder and more relational way.