Counselling Services

The counselling service provides a safe and confidential space for people to talk about their difficulties on a one-to-one basis.  Counselling aims to help people come to terms with recent life changes or struggles and lead a more fulfilling life.  It can help people view their difficulties from a different perspective and figure out alternative and more helpful ways of dealing with them.  It can also just give people the space to talk about and understand their experiences.

We will usually explore thoughts, feelings, and behaviour and then look at the impact these factors have on the individual’s life.  This can help people to become more understanding and accepting of themselves and to make positive life changes.

Counselling can help with many issues including: Anger Management, Loss and Grief, Confidence and Self-Esteem, Depression, Anxiety and Worry, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Pain Management, Alcohol and Substance Misuse, improving Interpersonal skills and Relationship difficulties.

The counselling service also provides psycho-educational and counselling groups.  In these groups people can learn more about brain injury, strategies to deal with certain emotional difficulties and share and process their experiences.  There are great benefits to group work including: no longer feeling alone or isolated, knowing you aren’t the only person who is struggling with a certain issue, feeling more hopeful when you see others making progress, and being able to help other group members, which can increase self-esteem.  The group setting also allows relationship difficulties/patterns to be worked through in the here and now, helping people to build confidence to socialise in other environments. 

Benefits of Counselling at Headway East London

Our counsellor specialises in working with clients with acquired brain injury and provides longer term psychotherapy to this client group. The counsellor’s therapeutic approach is “integrative”: this training incorporates different theories and techniques, which means the approach can be adapted to meet the needs of the individual.  The counsellor is trained to use Psychodynamic, Person-Centred, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.  Loss and Grief models also inform her work.  The counsellor also adapts her approach so that people with speech and language, memory, and processing difficulties can engage in the process.  Creative ways of working are used, including photographs, art work, role play, poetry, and song writing.  Written summaries of sessions are also given, as well as written strategies, and/or recording sessions for people to listen to throughout the week if they wish to.

M’s story

M referred himself to counselling after experiencing nightmares related to how he sustained his head injury.   He also felt angry and worried he might lose his temper and hurt somebody he cared about.   M had been violent in his past and feared the “old M” coming back. 

In counselling sessions we talked about his memory of the attack to help him process it and reduce his distress response.  We also used some cognitive behavioural strategies to recognise and deal with anger in a more helpful way.   M enjoyed sharing photographs so we also used these to produce a time line of his life.  M has difficulties with his autobiographical memory so this intervention helped him to remember and piece together his history and recognize the time space between old M and new M.  It depicted how much he and his environment had changed.

When we finished counselling M said:  “I’m a lover not a fighter, I feel like a new man, more relaxed, less flashbacks and less scared of the old M returning”.  He also said he felt less scared when talking about his attack.