This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

What I would it be like to meet yourself?  Do you think the two of you would get on well together?  Or would you dislike each other?  Would you find yourself interesting company, or a crashing bore?  Would you rub along OK together, or would it be an overly competitive relationship?

To imagine that you meet yourself, or someone with similar character traits to yourself can be an interesting party game to play, but at a deeper level, it can also be quite enlightening.  It is, of course the case that others see us differently to how we see ourselves, and this is commonly represented in the “Johari Window” (see diagram).

This model divides our self-knowledge into four areas :-

• The Public Self is known both to me and to others.  This is the face we show every day; for most of us this is the largest of the four areas.
• The Private Self is known to me but not to others.  For all of us, there are things we would do, say or think in private that we would not wish others to know about.
• The Hidden Self is known to others but not to me.  This may sound strange at first, but you can probably think of examples relating to yourself – maybe people have said things about you that you don’t agree with; have others commented that you are strange, bossy, shy, flirtatious, confident, optimistic?  Do you see yourself in the same way?
• The Unknown Self is known neither to you nor to others.  You might not be able to identify anything that fits into this part of the window.  But then, by definition, you wouldn’t be able to, would you?

The model itself is thought-provoking, but like all models is a simplificiation; in fact we have different Johari Windows in different situations – things that my partner knows about me will be different from what my boss knows; the public self I show to my parents will be different from that which I show to my friends; and every one of my friends and relations will have different opinions about me, so my hidden self will vary from one relationship to the next.

Thinking about that meeting with yourself is one way to explore this window, and the process of counselling will often change the relative sizes of the windows.  Commonly, you will discover things about yourself that you were not wholly aware of, so that the horizontal line moves down the window; your “self consciousness” increases.  It may also be that the vertical line moves; you may find it becomes easier to express your feelings, so that the vertical line moves to the right.  Or you may come to counselling wanting to change some behaviours, for instance to be less “needy”, so that the vertical line moves to the left.  By exploring and understanding yourself  – by mentally meeting yourself in counselling – you can increase your understanding and so change some of the choices you make.

Footnote: The story goes that the name “Johari” is not one with mystical significance, but was devised by the co-creators of the model, whose first names were Joe and Harry!

In working with clients, whether couples or individuals, I try to be flexible in terms of the style I adopt, matching it to your needs as a client. The best approach for you is something that we will work out together, during counselling.

Sometimes we will need to work to a deadline – maybe because of a planned house move, or a pregnancy, or because you have limited funds. In such cases I will help you to prioritise and focus on specific objectives that are likely to be achievable in the timeframe we have. For example, I worked recently with a couple who were expecting a baby in a few months. They decided to concentrate on improving their communication, leaving other issues aside for the time being. After four sessions, they felt that things had changed enough that they could finish counselling and use the communication skills they had developed to work on other aspects of the relationship at home.

In other cases counselling is open-ended but you may still want to work in a structured way, to talk about specific topics for a week or two weeks each for instance. It may be that you want to focus on managing anger, or want help to give up smoking. Or maybe you want to try to understand why a relationship has come to an end. Given a very specific objective such as one of these, it is possible to work in quite a focussed way. Having said that, because we are complicated beings, all sorts of different things might affect our behaviours, and the things that happen to us. So there will be times when it is sensible to explore “round the edges” of problems – maybe spending some time talking about family upbringing, for example.

At the other end of the scale, some people may want to use counselling just as a place to come and talk, to get support through a difficult period, maybe grieving for a loved one or getting through a difficult divorce. For those people counselling is just a safe place to release tension and to be able to voice thoughts in a non-judgmental environment. It may well be that their thoughts are very confused and muddled, and attempts to work in a structured way will not work at all. Over time, talking about the confusion of thoughts generally helps to clarify things for clients. It may take some time, especially if there is a lot of history, or particularly traumatic experiences, but the process of talking about events, thoughts and feelings genuinely helps to put them into perspective.

Whatever the situation, the style of counselling we adopt will be something we discuss and agree together. I will make sure that, during counselling, we frequently review the progress we are making and whether you feel the approach we are taking is the best one – or whether you think it’s time for a change of style.

People come to counselling for different reasons. For some, there are specific goals. For example, it could be that they want help to deal with an addiction, or to deal with their anger in better way. Or it might be that there are patterns in their life that they want to change; maybe they keep choosing the same sort of partners, and then their relationships go wrong. Maybe they find it difficult to hold down a job. Or there could be patterns in their relationship – patterns of repeating arguments, for instance – habits that they want to break.

Some people come to counselling with less clearly defined objectives. It may be just that they feel confused, or depressed, or numb, and want to talk things through to see what emerges. Or it may be that they want to explore past events, perhaps as a way of processing them and coming to peace with them.

I was recently talking to a client who said that her reason for coming to counselling had changed. She described counselling as a process, or a journey. When she originally contacted me, she had a clear objective in mind; a question that she wanted to answer, a confusion that she wanted to untangle. But then things changed. It was a bit like untangling a ball of wool. Strands were pulled out from the tangled mass, and gradually the mass became less dense, and more ordered. But what was at the centre of the tangle? Just as with a ball of wool, there was nothing there – the tangle was all there was.

For the client, clearing the confusion – untangling the wool – left her with the realization that the question she had brought to counselling was not the real question – or was only part of a bigger question that she needed to answer. She said that she was on a journey, and it felt that the route she was following was rather like a spiral.

Imagine yourself travelling along a spiral, circling a central point, and on each lap, moving closer to the core – closer to the answer. What can you see? In looking at the line ahead of you, you are never looking at the centre of the spiral – in fact, you are always looking “across” it, at right angles to the centre. And my client said that it felt as if an attempt to look directly at the centre of the spiral would throw her off course. She had faith that the spiral would lead her to the centre, but needed to follow the track she was on, not attempt to head straight for the centre.

I found this explanation of her counselling experience very interesting. It reminded me that different clients need different things from counselling. For some, a direct approach is the best way. For others, it is a much slower process. The important thing, for me as a counsellor, is to remember that the pace of counselling needs to be right for the client. The client needs to find, to define, the counselling style that works for them and I, as counsellor, need to be sensitive and responsive to that.

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

A client recently said to me that she found counselling useful because it enabled her to “put things in boxes”. What she meant was that, when she started counselling, all her thoughts and worries were running around in her head in an uncontrolled and confusing way. Counselling helped her to get her thoughts to behave in a more orderly way – she could categorise, prioritise, and have more control of what was going on in her head.

You can do this yourself, maybe by using physical boxes, or by making lists. And of course counselling can help because it gives you a safe place to talk about all the things that worry you, and professional guidance in helping you understand what is important, and where you can usefully focus your energies.

Follow me on twitter @paul_cockayne

People sometimes come to counselling saying that they don’t feel things the way they used to – they feel distanced from their surroundings, like an onlooker – and they are numb to events that are going on.

This experience is often a result of a shock, or a really difficult experience. When something awful happens, it seems that one way we cope with this is by retreating behind mental walls, by shutting ourselves away from our surroundings, thus putting ourselves in a safe place.

Seemingly, this happens without our being conscious of it – but often it seems that emerging from this safe place – back to “normality” – doesn’t happen, and so we find ourselves stuck in this safe, but numbed, place.

Counselling can help here because it is a safe, contained environment. A counsellor you trust can join you behind your protective walls when nobody else can. Together, you can then explore, and find a way out, back to a place where you can feel things like you used to.

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

Follow me on twitter @paul_cockayne

Sometimes it seems like there’s nothing to talk about – you and your partner know each other so well, that you’ve run out of topics of conversation.

Alongside my counselling I have, over the last year or so, been developing an iPhone application called “Couple Talk”. This consists of a bank of over 500 questions that provide talking points for couples. Questions are categorised and graded, so that you can choose how difficult or personal you want your conversation to be, and for each of the 500 questions, there are subsidiary questions which will help guide the conversation into new areas if you need that help.

The app will be available on the Apple store from Valentine’s Day, at £1.49. There will also be a website to accompany the app and I will be adding a link to that site from here in the next few weeks.

Of course, this app is not a substitute for counselling. It is aimed at couples who have run out of things to talk about. But if you don’t want to talk, or if you argue, professional counselling is likely to prove more useful to you.

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

Follow me on twitter @paul_cockayne

Do you make new year resolutions? Do you keep them? Do you even believe that you can?

We can easily get caught in patterns of behaviour that seem impossible to change, that keep repeating themselves, and sometimes it is difficult to understand why we keep on doing things that are unhelpful to ourselves or to others.

If you find yourself trapped in this way, counselling can be a useful resource. It can help you to look at your habits in different ways, to understand them better, and so to think about what help you might need to make changes permanent.

There are always reasons for the things we do – it’s just that sometimes they are not obvious. But if we can understand the reasons, it makes it a lot easier to change – and to make that change a permanent one, not one that only lasts for the first few days of January.