Why Choose Holistic Counselling?
Holistic counselling offers an opportunity to bring anything that is causing you distress to the table to be addressed and shifted.
Consider your life right now.
- Is there contentment?
- Where do you find that?
- In your relationships? At home? At work? At play?
- Is there contentment in your mind?
- When you go to your thoughts do you find them kind and accepting?
- Are you content with the amount of stress in your life? Does it serve you – helping you to achieve your goals?
- Are your emotions balanced – an array of the dark and the light – giving you a sense of the spectrum of human experience?
- Is everything in its right place?
- Is there anything about your experience of life that you’d like to be different?
This is where the facilitative support of a counsellor can help.
The counselling I provide takes a more holistic approach compared to regular counselling.
What does ‘holistic’ mean in this context?
There are a few principles which guide this style of therapy:
One, is that as holistic counsellors we take in the experience of the whole person when we consider ‘what is wrong’.
- How do emotions feel in the body?
- What reaction does the nervous system have to stress?
- What are the threads of thoughts? That is, what do they lead back to?
There isn’t any reaction that isn’t welcome and valuable as an insight into the whole of you.
Two, is that holistic counsellors understand any discordance in the body or the mind as a symptom to be addressed. So anxiety and depression for instance, are not considered lifelong diagnoses but instead the flags highlighting that something lies beneath.
We need the symptom because it points us in the direction of the underlying issue. Much like a stinging sensations alerts us to a splinter that needs to be removed.
What might these underlying issues be? In some instances it could be something like unresolved grief. It could be trauma. It could be the habits of our automatic brain that take us down worm holes that don’t serve us. It could be an isolated, difficult event long past or something that happened more recently.
The third principle of holistic counselling is that the pain of any trauma or difficult experience can be alleviated. It is with the utmost respect that I say that there are ways to relieve the distress caused by sexual, physical, emotional abuse, devastating loss and overwhelming change.
Holistic counsellors work with a range of powerful techniques that go to the heart of the suffering and gently relieve the original anguish.
Together – client and counsellor – work to find that which got lost – whether it was innocence or joy; health or peace. Our work is to reinstate those elements so that you feel more integrated, congruent and whole.
Finally, holistic counselling is different to regular counselling in that we do not spend a lot of time hearing every last detail of the story of the issue. I know many clients are exhausted by this style of counselling – having to relive events over and over again. Instead we work to uncover the issue behind the story and work from this perspective to clear the attachment to the story so that it has much less of a hold and impact in our daily life.
I’d like to return to a point I made earlier that anything distressing can be addressed in counselling. Whatever keeps you up at night is the place to start:
Worries about children, partners, work, illness, the recent fires, climate change – big and small concerns – all give us the experience of being distracted or exhausted, scared or overwhelmed. Of course we understand that counselling can never change the external features of our lives.
The solace of counselling is that it can change the way we experience, quantify and deal with these difficult, frightening and confusing events.
Doing this work is obviously important because it gives you respite from your worrying thoughts but it is also important because it then frees you up to be more available to those you love, those who also suffer and a planet that needs healthy, empowered and unencumbered people to serve it.
This article is an invitation to give holistic counselling a try. If your New Year’s resolution touched on being less stressed, more present or living a better life then now might be the time to take the first step towards addressing the issues which are keeping you from that.
Feel free to contact me on giselaboetkercounselling@gmail.com or 0421 407 004 for a free 20 minute conversation about what holistic counselling can offer you.
Very best as you step into 2020.
Gisela