Counselling is a relationship where you and your counsellor work together to help you understand how you're feeling, why you're feeling that way, and how you can feel better. Sometimes it's about gaining more of an understanding or acceptance of difficult or traumatic situations you have been through, sometimes it's about finding out more about yourself. Research has shown time and time again that the most important variable in successful counselling is feeling that there is the possibility of change in your life, at least an openness to this possibility. There is some neuroscience around how receiving caring empathic understanding from someone else helps our own internal experience of self-understanding and self-acceptance, as well as the more informal experience we all might have had of being able to express ourselves honestly and openly without having to worry about how the person we're talking to is feeling. At Thought Therapy, we believe that you are the expert on your own experience and struggles. We don't pretend to know better how to resolve things, but we absolutely trust you to be able to work things out in your own way. All clients are unique individuals, and that means we work uniquely with all of them to find and agree the best way of being helpful. How much counselling will I need? It’s not usually possible to predict how long someone might need to have counselling for. We offer open-ended counselling with no fixed number of sessions, but regular reviews with clients to make sure things are working. Some clients also choose to take a break from counselling and then come back later, or return to work on different issues. This will always be something which our counsellors will be happy to talk with you about. Will counselling be confidential? Confidentiality is essential in counselling, it's one of the strongest ways of building a trusting and supportive relationship. Nearly everything you talk to your counsellor about will be just between you and them. But it's not absolute. There are times when your counsellor may need to break confidentiality, which they will contract with you in the first session. Most of these situations are about keeping you or someone else safe – especially anyone under 18 – but there are a few rare situations where it is against the law not to pass information on, for example: terrorism or organised crime. The only other person your counsellor will talk to about your work together is their supervisor. Their role is to keep the work safe and to help your counsellor be effective and helpful. Our supervisors don't have access to any personal information about clients, and any conversations about counselling are kept confidential by the supervisor too.