Mic Austen Counselling and Psychotherapy

Accredited counselling/psychotherapy for individuals and couples in Brentwood, Shenfield, Chelmsford, Upminster, Hornchurch, Billericay in Essex and Paddington, Maida Vale, Little Venice in Central and West London

Counselling or Psychotherapy?

Ultimately, the most important and essential requirement for counselling or psychotherapy to work, is not the theory that is used but the relationship that we create together. This unique relationship, although unfamiliar, provides a safe place in which to explore your problems and difficulties and it is in this relationship that the healing takes place. If you feel comfortable, safe and supported you will be able to explore your feelings and create the changes that you wish in your life.

I use the terms Counselling and Psychotherapy together on this website even though they are quite distinct disciplines:

Counselling:

Counselling tends to be solution- and goal-orientated, enabling you to discover practical ways of taking responsibility for your difficulties and ways of realising your aims and objectives.

Counselling involves talking with a person in a way that helps that person solve a problem or helps to create conditions that will cause the person to understand and/or improve his behaviour, character, values or life circumstances.

Counselling training tends to be shorter and less in-depth than psychotherapy training. In addition counsellors are not required by their accrediting body to be in their own counselling.

Psychotherapy:

Psychotherapy is generally undertaken to gain self-knowledge. Most people come to therapy because the defences which have served them in the past are no longer working or useful. While psychotherapy can include certain aspects of counselling, it is also an opportunity for you to explore your problems and difficulties in more depth. It is more usual in psychotherapy for work to be open-ended and longer-term.

As such, psychotherapy tends to be longer and more in-depth than counselling, reflected in the length of training required for psychotherapy. In addition, psychotherapists are obliged to be in their own psychotherapy for the duration of the training – usually a minimum of 4 years. For many therapists this is an on-going part of their ‘Continuous Professional Development’ and their own healing. Because of their own therapy, psychotherapists tend to understand how daunting it can be to make that initial contact and to begin what can be very difficult work.

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