My Approach to Counselling – Counselling With Keith

A Space for Growth and Change

My approach to counselling is relational and integrative. This means I believe that our well-being is deeply connected to our relationships—with others, with ourselves, and with the world around us—and I use a blend of therapeutic approaches to create a safe, supportive, and understanding space tailored specifically to your unique needs. Together, we can explore what’s going on for you and work towards greater well-being.

My aim is to help you understand the connections between your past and present, empower you with new insights and coping strategies, and support you in making meaningful changes as you move towards fulfilling your full potential.

How Our Work Together Can Help

Everyone’s experience is different, but clients often find that our work together helps them to:

Gain a Better Understanding of Yourself: Get clearer insight into why you feel the way you do, why you react in certain ways, and what your needs truly are.
Feel More in Control of Your Emotions: Learn new ways to manage difficult emotions like anxiety, sadness, or anger.
Improve Your Relationships: Understand your patterns in relationships which can help you connect with others in healthier and more fulfilling ways.
Find New Perspectives: See your problems or yourself in a new light, which can open up possibilities you hadn’t considered before.
Build Confidence and Self-Esteem: As you understand yourself better and develop new coping skills, your confidence can grow.
Make Meaningful Changes: Feel empowered to make changes in your life that lead to greater happiness and well-being.
Feel Less Alone: Know you have a dedicated space and a supportive person to work through things with can make a difference.

What Our Sessions Will Be Like

My commitment is to create an environment where you feel truly heard and respected. We’ll move at your pace, and you decide what you want to share and what we look at together.

I might ask questions to help you explore things more deeply, offer different perspectives, or sometimes, we might try specific exercises or ways of thinking about things if it feels right for you.

Our work together is a partnership guided by these core principles:

Seeing You and Your Potential

Seeing Your Potential: My approach is grounded in the belief that at the core of every person is a natural drive to grow, heal, and become more fully themselves. Even if it doesn’t feel like it right now because you’re feeling lost, stuck, or hopeless, that potential is there.
Seeing You as a Whole Person: I see you as a whole person – mind, body, emotions, relationships, and the wider context of your life.

Building Our Connection

Building a Strong Connection: The therapeutic relationship we build together is central. Creating a safe and confidential space where you feel you can trust me enough to openly explore difficult or painful feelings or experiences is a powerful part of the healing process. I aim to be genuine and present with you. Sometimes, just having this kind of supportive connection can be incredibly healing.
A Collaborative Partnership: As you are the ultimate expert on your own life, I see my role as a collaborative partner, bringing professional knowledge and skills to our work. Together, in a safe and non-judgmental space, we will integrate both of our perspectives to explore your situation, tap into your own inner wisdom, and find the best path forward.
Being Fully Present with You: My focus is entirely on you and your experience. I am committed to being fully present, listening attentively to your words and also to the feelings and experiences behind them.
Remaining Curious and Open: I approach our sessions with genuine curiosity, guided by the principle of “safe uncertainty” (Mason, 1993), meaning we don’t need to have all the answers immediately but can explore possibilities together.

Exploring Your World

A Flexible Approach, Guided by You: Because I use a blend of approaches, our work can be flexible. If one way of looking at things isn’t useful, we can try another until we find what works best. Our sessions are always led by you and what you wish to explore.
Understanding Your Past: Our past experiences and relationships shape how we feel and act today, often in ways we don’t fully realise. We might gently explore some of these connections if it feels helpful, not to dwell on the past, but to understand its impact on your present and allow you to make informed choices.
Exploring Current Patterns: We can also look at any patterns in your thinking or behaviour that might be causing you difficulty. For example, you might have certain ways of thinking that lead to anxiety or low mood. We can work together to identify these and find more helpful and balanced ways to approach things.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves: We all create meaning from our experiences and tell ourselves stories about who we are and what has happened to us. Sometimes these stories can hold us back. We can explore these stories, see if they’re still serving you, and perhaps find new, more empowering ways to understand your experiences.
Exploration and Action: Our work can be explorative or it can also be focused on moving towards specific goals if you wish.

Ensuring Your Safety

Ethical and Professional Practice: I practice ethically and professionally in line with the Ethical Framework of my professional body. This includes offering you confidentiality, respecting your autonomy and ensuring I offer you the best possible support.

My Approach in More Detail: The Theories Behind Our Work

This section offers a more detailed look at the professional theories and principles that underpin my integrative and relational work – for those that are interested.

My approach to counselling is fundamentally integrative and relational, grounded in the belief that each person’s journey towards healing and growth is unique and therefore requires an individually tailored therapeutic approach.

Assimilative Integration with a Person-Centred Heart

At the heart of my practice is a humanistic philosophy. This philosophy views individuals as whole persons, not reduced to a collection of symptoms or a diagnosis, possessing an innate human drive to realise their unique potential and move towards wholeness. This fundamental drive, known as the self-actualising tendency, is your inherent capacity for growth. My core therapeutic approach is person-centred therapy, as I believe a therapeutic relationship built on empathy, congruence (genuineness), and unconditional positive regard provides the optimal conditions for your self-actualising tendency, for you to explore your inner world, understand yourself more deeply, and move towards growth and change.

This person-centred core serves as the foundation for the integration of other theories. This means that while the relationship itself is paramount, I carefully integrate principles and techniques from other therapeutic modalities to meet your specific needs. This avoids a “one-size-fits-all” approach, allowing for flexibility and individuality.

The Power of Connection: A Relational Approach

I view counselling as a collaborative partnership. As humans, we exist in relationship with others, and our struggles often emerge from, and are understood within, these relational contexts. Through experiencing a safe, supportive, non-judgemental relationship with me in sessions, you can begin to heal wounds created in relationships with others.

I use Petrūska Clarkson’s Five Relationship Model as a framework to understand the different aspects of the counselling relationship and to guide the integration of various theoretical perspectives as needed.

The Foundation: Humanistic Perspectives

The humanistic perspective is the philosophical heart of my practice. It’s less a set of techniques and more a fundamental worldview about what it means to be human and what helps us thrive. In practice, this commitment to your worth and potential looks like this:

Understanding your life from your point of view: I will listen to you so that I can begin to see the world through your eyes. I hope that you will feel heard and fully accepted for who you are, without judgment or conditions. By building trust and understanding between us, you can feel more able to be open about all aspects of your experience, even the parts you find difficult or confusing.
A genuine connection from one person to another: While I bring professional experience and knowledge, I meet you as a fellow human being. I’m not here as a distant expert to assess or direct you, but as someone present and authentic, accompanying you on your process of discovery.
You Are the Expert on Your Life: You hold the deepest understanding of your own life and experiences. My role is to offer a supportive space and different perspectives as we navigate uncertainty and explore your path together.
Looking at Your Strengths and Potential: While we explore the challenges you’re facing, we will also consider your strengths and potential so you can discover or rediscover your resources and resilience.

Understanding Your Story: Psychodynamic Perspectives

While our focus is on your life today, sometimes the key to moving forward lies in understanding the story of how you got here. This isn’t about blaming the past, but about understanding the ‘why’ behind your feelings and actions so you can make more conscious choices today. Here is how we might explore these connections:

Understanding Unconscious Processes: I integrate psychodynamic approaches to explore how past experiences, significant relationships, and deeply rooted, often unconscious, patterns of coping or relating that might be influencing your current feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. The aim is to bring these into awareness, fostering insight and the potential for new ways of relating to yourself and others.
Exploring Early Experiences: Influenced by attachment theory, I may explore with you how early relational experiences shape your current interpersonal behaviours, attitudes, and expectations.
Creating A Secure Base for Exploration: Also influenced by attachment theory, I aim to create a secure base from which you can explore vulnerabilities.
Tolerating Uncertainty and Doubt: I stay present with you without rushing to conclusions or imposing interpretations, creating space for your unique meaning and understanding to emerge. This also links to the psychodynamic themes of “knowing and not knowing” and “holding and containing” that I see as central to the therapeutic process.

Building New Skills: Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) Perspectives

Alongside deep understanding, therapy can also equip you with practical tools to navigate daily challenges. This is not about forced positivity, but about empowering you with concrete skills you can use right away to feel more in control. Here is how we might find practical tools:

Exploring the Links Between Thoughts, Feelings, and Actions: Sometimes, the way we think about things, and the actions we take, can get us stuck in unhelpful patterns. By understanding that our thoughts, feelings and behaviours influence each other we can find ways to make a change to one that affects the others. For example, we could look at how certain self-critical thoughts might lead to feelings of anxiety, which then might cause you to avoid certain situations.
Identifying Unhelpful Thinking Habits: We can identify any recurring patterns of thinking that might be contributing to your difficulties to see if they are accurate and appropriate or if there might be more balanced or helpful perspectives which are still true.
Developing New Perspectives and Skills: If we identify thoughts or behaviours that you’d like to change, we can collaboratively explore alternative ways of thinking or practical strategies you could try. This might involve looking at evidence for or against a particular thought, or trying out new behaviours in a safe way. This is not about forced positivity, but about finding a more balanced perspective that still feels authentic to you.

Mason, B. (1993). Towards Positions of Safe Uncertainty. Human Systems: The Journal of Systemic Consultation and Management, 4(3–4), 189–200.