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Tuesday 07 February 2012 |
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 Christabel Butler
Follow me on Twitter @suryokiran
NEWS: Teachers’ counselling support: Christabel Butler UKCP, UKAHPP, working in Cirencester and Fairford, is an approved counselling provider by schools’ insurance service.
For short pieces on the following topics, click on articles page (see contents at left of page) or scroll to the bottom of this page.
CONCERNS ABOUT SEX
COUPLES COUNSELLING FOR RELATIONSHIPS
AH! CHRISTMAS (OR IS IT AAAAAARGH!! CHRISTMAS?)
(previously published in Cirencester Scene)
Phone: 01367 850516 at any time - including weekday evenings and at weekends. If necessary please leave your details and I will call you back, (or e-mail if that is more secure).
Email: christabel@cotswoldtalkingtherapies.co.uk
Locations: Cirencester & Fairford (Disabled access at Fairford)
I am a humanistic psychology practitioner, offering a gestalt and/or transpersonal approach for:
- Individual counselling
- Couples (relationship) counselling
- Support for collaborative law clients who are separating/divorcing
- Resolution of uncomfortable & stuck situations, eg between siblings or colleagues
- Individual home counselling for the housebound
Training & qualifications
Four year Gestalt psychotherapy training with Cambridge GATE (Gestalt Awareness and Training Experience)
Couples Therapy Training with Jamie Agar, UKCP
Continuing professional development trainings every year, (including annual 3-day residential course)
Accredited: UK Association of Humanistic Psychology Practitioners.
Registrant: UK Council for Psychotherapy (Psychotherapeutic counselling section).
I am an active member of UKAHPP and a member of our working party on accreditation and re-accreditation.
Other professional associations: BACP,Gloucestershire Network for Counsellors and Psychotherapists. UKRC registered.
Experience
I have been working as a psychotherapeutic counsellor for 20 years in private practice and I love my work. For 13 years I worked concurrently as a volunteer counsellor for Cotswold Counselling, in their centres and in people’s homes. For five years I was also the part-time paid co-ordinator of Cotswold Counselling’s Home Counselling service.
Initial contact
Everything that passes between us is confidential. In our first phone call, (or e-mail exchange), we talk about your needs and how working together may best serve them. We can discuss any questions and concerns that you may have about counselling.
Rates
Individual counselling/psychotherapy £40 (1 hour)
Couples counselling £50 (1 hour)
Collaborative law appointments - £70 per hour. This work is specialised, with fewer, irregularly timed appointments, and collaboration with other professionals.
Home Counselling £40 (1 hour) + negotiated fee for travel time/distance
Some concessions can be arranged - when available.
I am registered as a provider with some of the major insurance companies so you may be able to reclaim some counselling fees if you have a health, household or other policy.
3 Short articles on several topics, first published in Cirencester Scene:
1 Concerns about sex
2 Couples counselling - When a Relationship Flounders
3 Ah! Christmas, or is it Aaaaargh! Christmas?
1 CONCERNS ABOUT SEX - CAN COUNSELLING HELP?
It’s all around us – on tv, in writing, in films, in your face - sex everywhere. Yet there are many thinking “Others look as though they are getting what they like and want, so what about me?”
Whether young, old, disabled or able-bodied, lots of people are unsure whether they should be feeling how they feel or wanting what they want. Many feel unable to speak to anyone and feel trapped and alone in whatever degree of unhappiness.
Sexual issues and the pain they evoke can be dealt with if they are sensitively and openly explored. By talking in confidence with a counsellor or therapist, people can discover more about how their own attitudes and expectations of sex have been developed and been influenced by their families, peer group or culture. They can find the support needed to look at their patterns of behaviour and reactions to sexual issues.
Finding a new clarity can reveal choices where before there has seemed only stalemate.
Christabel Butler UKAHPP,UKCP
01367 850516
christabel@cotswoldtalkingtherapies.co.uk
2 COUNSELLING FOR COUPLES: WHEN A RELATIONSHIP FOUNDERS
When a relationship founders, it is useful to look back at its development. At first, each person is listening carefully to the other’s preferences. The tendency is to accommodate any differences, skimming over them concentrating on the shared enjoyment and similarities. Having learned how best to connect and be together, mostly any disparities are put aside.
When coping with a new situation, like having children, redundancy or moving house, any vulnerabilities in the relationship become activated. Mostly each person knows how to operate together when things go smoothly. They have few tools for dealing with disagreement, miscommunication or feeling stuck.
By the time a couple is thinking that counselling might help, it is likely they are not able to hear or listen to each other, neither do they want to. Each feels misunderstood and probably hurt and angry.
The counsellor will make clear that (s)he is there to look at the relationship, not to take sides or shame and blame. The work is: to map the current situation of the relationship in all aspects, and to help them both understand how they have reached this point; to support them to find out what changes would have to be made to motivate them to stay together, or if that is not possible, to consider separation. Then there is an opportunity to work on a way forward, together or apart.
The counsellor facilitates communication. Usually couples trying to resolve problems go round and round in well-trodden circles, attacking and/or defending or sometimes avoiding all but the most cursory communication. In the therapy room, each has an opportunity to be heard and to hear. Useful procedures for clearer communication can be learned and used outside counselling sessions.
Relationship counselling is fruitful before things go awry. Increased awareness of ways in which couples communicate/miscommunicate helps them to prevent acute hiccups in the relationship developing into chronic difficulties.
Christabel Butler UKAHPP, UKCP
For more information on relationship counselling 01367 850516
christabel@cotswoldtalkingtherapies.co.uk
3 AH! CHRISTMAS. Or it is AAAAARRGH! CHRISTMAS?
The pressure to have a wonderful/jolly/peaceful time builds weeks before December 25th. Sometimes the reality is a miserable/anxious/combative time. The worst Christmas that I remember experiencing involved being alone in a remote cottage, in gales and pouring rain, with the possibility of being flooded by sewage and waking to an electricity cut. That meant sandbags at the doors, no heating or hot water, no cooker or tv in those pre-internet days.
What got me through (apart from the linesmen’s heroic work to get the power back by the evening), was being able to phone a neutral, empathetic person, who listened to my story, let me feel sorry for myself, allowing me to cry and to be angry, until I started feeling better. Because of his listening skills and his witnessing of my feelings, I was freed up to access some self-support and to consider some creative ideas for being less miserable.
Reflective listening is amongst the attributes of a good counsellor, as is having a non-judgmental, open mind and an awareness of self. A client can be overwhelmed by strong feelings, feel distressed, be struggling with anger, lacking in self-confidence, grieving or stuck in depression. Being heard by somebody who listens and who can allow feelings to be expressed safely is a relief. Clarity follows, often with the discovery of options hitherto unnoticed, and choice for change.
However well-meaning friends and family are, it is hard for them to hear discomfort or pain. They often feel they must solve the problem, when what may be needed is to be heard sympathetically.
I and my colleagues in Cotswold Talking Therapies offer professional counselling and longer-term therapy, (in several locations), to individuals, to couples, to young people, to the housebound and to separating couples participating in collaborative law.
Christabel Butler UKAHPP,UKCP
Accredited psychotherapeutic counsellor
01367 850516
christabel@cotswoldtalkingtherapies.co.uk
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