FAQS about the Counselling Service

What kinds of counselling do you do?
Individual Counselling with adults and young people. Family Therapy with parents and their adolescent children. Parenting Counselling with one or more parents. Couples Relationship Therapy.

What if my partner refuses to attend?
If your partner refuses to attend counselling, that is OK.
You can still come and explore the issues for yourself. Often when one partner attends counselling it can promote growth in the whole relationship. Your partner might get interested later.
In attending counselling by yourself you will receive the support you need and develop a clearer sense of what you need to do around making changes for yourself and be clearer about what you want for your future.

How many sessions do I need to do?
On average people tend to complete 4 to 10 sessions.
Number of sessions can depend on the level of complexity of problems presenting and the capacity of clients to continue over the longer term.
Counselling may be valued as an investment in your personal and professional development and for improving quality of your close relationships.
Counselling can be something you do periodically, throughout your life when the need arises.

Will you be able to tell us if our relationship is worth working on?
Counselling provides a context for you to safely explore the question of staying or leaving.
Couples can often feel hopeless because they believe they have tried everything and nothing has worked. Counselling can help assess and identify the appropriate underlying issues that are leading to dysfunction in the relationship and work to resolve these.

Will it really help, how will we benefit?
Counselling can help locate key areas for change where the relationship needs strengthening. For example you need core knowledge around what healthy functioning relationships look like, and ideas about what each partner contributes to the problem in the relationship. There needs to be an exploration of each partners inner world and some ideas around what is needed for each person to change, to have some satisfaction with the relationship.

We argue constantly about the stupidest things, can you help?
That is a common statement and suggests that what we argue about is often not the problem, but how we argue. We need to learn how to argue well! Counselling can help you develop maturity and depth in this area. Counselling may help you understand what is going on in those repeating cycles of conflict. It can help you gain valuable knowledge about yourself, partner and others. Counselling can assist in developing a core set of relational skills that will give you some confidence and mastery in areas where currently you feel confused and angry.

Do we attend together?
Generally, couples attend together.
To deal with couple issues it works best to have the couple in session engaging with each other. Couple therapy is simply two people being helped to talk as a couple and to develop effective, caring ways to relate.

If we make changes, does that change last?
Changes can last.
Through counselling people can experience being freed from unhelpful patterns of behaviour and have lasting change. Change is also related to the ongoing decisions and choices we make, to live practiced patterns of living over time, with a commitment to not return to old behaviours.
Through counselling we can soften over time and learn to communicate in more caring, loving ways. We can learn how to engage with the same old issues, with a quality of skill and care that is evidence of a developing maturity. Counselling can help you understand that lifelong process.

My partner worries he/she will be picked on?
It is inevitable that one partner will be the centre of attention at different points throughout counselling. The issue of experiencing uncomfortable emotions in counselling is to be expected and becomes one of the major aspects of the therapy to be worked on. But as you talk about issues like feeling threat and all the emotions attached to it, it gets easier and normal. Things that were once threatening are more easily navigated.

What do we need to do to prepare for the first session?
It would help if you could think about what the core issues are and how you might contribute to the issues. Think about the goals for counselling what you desire to change in yourself and where you feel your partner could change.