Helena Samuels

I offer both daytime and evenings sessions on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. 

I am open to working both face to face and/or online.

As a person centred counsellor, I aim to provide you with a warm and secure environment where you feel safe in sharing your story, issues and problems. This then enables our work together to explore the worries, concerns, anxieties, confusions, thoughts, feelings and behaviours that are impacting on your mental health and wellbeing.

You might have a clear idea of why you want to come to counselling and what you want to gain from it or maybe you feel like something needs to shift, to be different but you’re unsure what that is. You may have been thinking about coming to counselling for a while or be prompted to reach out by a recent event or crisis. 

It doesn’t matter where your starting point is as our work together is guided by your wants and needs and will be at a pace that is appropriate for you. We will work together to enable your personal growth by exploring your experiences, your strengths and your sense of who you are. While working on making changes can be a challenging process at times, it will always be a supportive one.

Change is often at the heart of what brings people to counselling. Perhaps you want to make changes in yourself or make changes in the way you behave or relate to others. Through our sessions you may find yourself understanding yourself and your mental health differently, making sense of your past in a different way, reacting to situations and relationships differently, behaving differently or even making sense of the world and how you fit into it differently.

It could be that that what has changed in your life is something that you have no control over but is something you have to react to and deal with. Experiencing loss, illness, disability, redundancy for example can bring potentially painful changes to your life. Maybe you need support in dealing with the difficult emotions you are experiencing in such situations or help in learning how to accept that life is now different and considering how you are going to adapt to your new reality.

Counselling can be tough at times so it is my intention to create a safe, non-judgemental and genuine approach to our counselling relationship that enables you to work towards reaching your full potential.

I work in a broadly pluralistic way which means that if it is relevant and useful to our work together then I will draw on other counselling theories albeit making use of their ideas and concepts within a person centred way of working. This could include approaches such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Transactional Analysis, Gestalt, Psychodynamic theory and Attachment Theory.

I offer a free initial consultation session, either face to face or online. This is an opportunity for you to tell me about you, what is bringing you to therapy and to explore your wants. needs and expectations. In turn I will explain a bit about me and the way in which I would be working with you as your counsellor. We will also discuss practical issues as well as the boundaries of our counselling relationship.  

By the end of this session, I hope to have answered all of your questions and queries so that you have a good understanding of the counselling process, how we will be working together and that you are clear about the more practical aspects such as timings, fees and holiday arrangements. At the point where we decide that we would like to work together we would then set up a time and date to begin your ongoing sessions.