Hello, my name is Kevin. I am a psychotherapist, counsellor and Cognitive Behaviour Therapist offering counselling in Finchley, Golders Green, Hendon, Barnet, North London and online.
As a practicing therapist with more than thirty year's experience, I've helped many people from different backgrounds and I work with a range of therapies depending on what is best for the client.
Sometimes life can throw at us more than we are able make sense of. This can affect you and your relationships, whether at work or in your personal life and a loss of self-confidence can lead to some critical, negative thinking. You begin to see how you are thinking and behaving in a way you don't like - in the same 'old situation' - feeling both anxious and stressed. You know you don't want to be there, yet somehow it's happened again.
When you come to see the therapist, the ‘problem’ you are trying to understand often feels like it is just happening to you, rather than something you can decide to do something about. Counselling gives you a safe place to talk about what's happening in your life, but without the shame or guilty feelings that are often a part of the 'problem'. Getting things out in the open and sharing them with someone who can listen without being involved, helps you understand the difficulties you are facing, and to see them from a different perspective. This helps you realise that this negative thinking about yourself can be challenged, and then you start to see it's not necessary and it certainly doesn't help.
A part of this process, is about understanding how relationships from the past can play out in the present. This in turn allows you to develop a more mindful attitude towards yourself, rather than just reacting when you feel stressed and anxious.
An important part of counselling, is that as it progresses and you become more aware and confident, you can think about new ways of addressing these issues, and start to make changes in the world outside. But this is not an easy process, it takes time and effort, and having someone there, travelling with you and supporting you as you start to find a better way to get on with your life, can make a real difference.
Counselling almost always starts with the ‘problem’ – feeling anxious and stressed, panic attacks, not sleeping well, self-medicating with drugs or alcohol, issues around low self-esteem, obsessing about things, procrastinating, often feeling tired and a myriad other ways of describing what is troubling you. But underneath this unhappiness there is also what I sometimes call an emotional or 'subjective logic'.
What is that tendency or 'emotional logic' which keeps you in a relationship that is not working, why do you keep obsessing or going on about certain things, what’s making you very anxious at times or angry, why are you so critical of yourself and often feel you must do more than you need to and end up sliding into those feelings of depression and low self-esteem? It is these subjective 'logics' or tendencies that can have an addictive quality, in the sense you keep getting drawn into them, which you can then explore in the therapy. And it is by exploring them and understanding what is going on that paves the way for making real changes in your life.
People come to me for help with a wide range of issues. You can see below some of the more common difficulties that can be addressed through counselling:
Feelings of stress or anxiety
Panic attacks
Relationship problems
Grief, loss or bereavement
Problems with addiction
Trauma and post-traumatic stress
Abuse
Depression
Problems with confidence or self-esteem
Anger management
Issues relating to one's identity
Difficulties at work or in retirement
Family problems in the present and from the past
©2022 Kevin Rose
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