Louise is a qualified and experienced counsellor and psychotherapist who sees individuals and couples for both short- and long-term work.
SERVICES
Welcome to Louise Cottingham
Who are counselling and psychotherapy for?
If you are going through difficult times or feel that you could be living your life more fully, counselling or psychotherapy could help. Perhaps old patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving helped you get by when you were a child but no longer serve you well. Perhaps you just have too much going on at home or work and feel stressed, depressed, or anxious. Maybe you are starting to suffer physical symptoms, or to depend too much on alcohol. Perhaps your relationship is not going well or you are struggling to make friends or you have issues around gender or sexuality. Are past experiences or traumas spoiling your life in the present? These are the kinds of issues I can help with, as well as other emotional or psychological difficulties.
My approach to therapy
Gestalt Therapy is my main approach, and I have also trained in Transactional Analysis and in Person-Centred Counselling. In Gestalt Therapy we pay attention to mind, body and emotions, developing greater awareness of ourselves and how we relate to other people. This can give a person more choices and enable them to live their life more fully.
We develop in relationship with other people right from babyhood (and, arguably, also in the womb) and this continues throughout our lives. Relationships may be helpful to us by enriching our lives, or we may repeatedly co-create unhelpful relationships which do not serve us well. Research shows that the counselling relationship is the most significant factor within therapy related to positive outcome from therapy.
Initially I work to set up a framework for therapy with a clear agreement and both of us knowing what we are doing here. This is important to carry us through any difficult times and to provide a secure base for the work of therapy.
My relationship with my client, my feelings towards them, and their responses to me, are of prime importance in the therapy. What is happening now in the room has an immediacy and power. This provides information about how the client may have been treated in the past and about how they might be in other relationships outside the therapy room. My aim is to bring their patterns of relating into their awareness at a fundamental level involving thinking, sensing, feeling and behaviour, to enable them to develop more choices.
I am interested in a client’s background and culture, sexuality and gender and possible disabilities. How have these factors affected their relating and how others relate to them, in both their current and past situations? How do differences and similarities between us affect how we relate?
On another level I hope to offer my clients a different experience to other relationships, so that their relationship with me can have a healing effect. As I perceive their developmental needs I work to bring these into awareness. I aim to find a balance between giving the client what they seek; and holding back to allow them to feel the loss and to grieve for what they have missed in their earlier life.
As the therapy progresses, both the client and I notice differences in our relating. Changes also occur in how the client relates to others in the outside world as they start to form more satisfying relationships, and perhaps give up unhelpful ones. Eventually we will agree to work towards an ending and enter this important stage of therapy. Over an agreed period of time we are occupied with, for instance, feeling the impact of earlier losses, reviewing, reworking, celebrating and feeling sadness at parting and pleasure at the changes the client has made.
Next steps
If this sounds interesting to you, contact me to make an appointment for an initial session. You can come and check me out for half an hour free of charge, in which case I won’t ask about your issues. Alternatively you could pay for a full session of fifty minutes in which you can meet me and I can begin to assess whether I am likely to be able to help you. If, when we meet, I don’t think I am the right person to help with what you bring, I won’t charge you for the session. My usual fee is £38 for a fifty minute session, or £48 for an hour’s session for a couple. I usually see clients once a week. I may work with an individual or couple on a specific problem for an agreed number of weeks, or we may work towards deeper change over months or sometimes years.
About me
I first became interested in counselling through being in couples therapy myself. Alongside a career in environmental management, I began with an evening class, followed by a counselling skills diploma. Subsequently I studied for three years part-time on a Diploma in Humanistic Counselling and more recently gained a Masters Degree in Gestalt Psychotherapy from Middlesex University.
My early counselling studies focussed on the approach of Carl Rogers and I value what I learned about how to be with people; the importance of dialogue; and of valuing each person’s unique view of the world. I hold in mind that everyone is the same and everyone is different.
I continued my studies with Transactional Analysis which taught me about the personality model of ‘parent, adult, and child’, and about how we repeat patterns and reinforce our views of the world in relationships.
I began my counselling career in 1994 in a voluntary placement which I set up with a Doctors’ Surgery. I stayed for thirteen years! I worked at the original surgery and another in the same district on a part-time self-employed basis until I left to focus on my private practice in September 2007. Primary Care work gave me experience with clients from diverse backgrounds and cultures, aged from eighteen to eighty, and with a very wide range of issues.
I have been a psychotherapist in private practice since 1999 and a counselling supervisor since 2001. I see both private clients and people referred through employee assistance companies.
The image of the tree
You might be puzzled by my choice of image at the head of this page. It is of a small tree growing high up in the Yorkshire Dales. I am delighted to see how this tree has grown in rocky ground, been buffeted by wind and rain, and yet developed to be so shapely and beautiful. In the same way, I believe that we can grow into well-shaped and beautiful human beings in spite of past and present difficulties.
QUALIFICATION DETAILS
MSc in Gestalt PsychotherapyBACP Senior Accredited CounsellorUKCP Registered Psychotherapist
Service Categories
Counselling, Psychotherapy
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