AC Counselling Belfast (UK & Ireland wide)

• Over 3.5 years continuing experience (600+ client hours) working almost exclusively with transgender clients, committed to a career focus on serving the transgender community. (Rainbow Project, Belfast)
• Commonly use person-centred, existential, and CBT theories, along with inner child work, and understandings of Internal Family Systems, to create an individualised approach.
• Approach is client led and at your own pace, however I will gently challenge ingrained and unhelpful thinking patterns (including avoidance and denial) and direct to potentially useful exercises and experiments to challenge ingrained beliefs, when appropriate.
• Safety and results in counselling most often come as a result of the relationship built between client and counsellor. By working together we can help support you in discovering and moving towards desired results with safety and consistency, especially when it feels difficult.
• Developing awareness of patterns and beliefs helps us build foundational emotional literacy which can be used in deeper processing work. Here, the work you do outside of therapy is just as important as what we do together in session.
• Work is interactive, sometimes using virtual whiteboards to create visual references that can be sent to you for consideration outside counselling.
• By understanding the ideas behind therapeutic techniques, you can develop psychological skills that allow you to become your own counsellor. I endeavour to foster new learning through transparent, digestible and understandable exploration of important concepts.

  Gender Identity work examples:

• Understanding and affirming gender identity and sexuality,
• Exploring personal identity in a judgement free, understanding environment,
• Defining your own identity your own way, in your own time,
• Working with shame and fear,
• Practical transition/detransition guidance,
• Coming out to friends, family, work,
• Relationship issues,
• Navigating medical issues,
• Passing issues,
• Coping in the political climate,
• Voice lesson crash course (single session with included resource bundle)

CPTSD Work:

If it took a long time to really hurt you, then it will take time to heal, often it is a lifetime’s work, and one of the most challenging yet rewarding things a trauma survivor can do. By developing new understandings and skills in how we relate with ourselves and the world, real progress towards recovery is possible. 

Some examples of modalities that may be used:

• Introject work, i.e. understanding and differentiating our actual beliefs from harmful unconscious beliefs learned from others during childhood,
• Examining ‘conditions of worth,’ who we feel we need to act as to be “good enough” in the eyes of those introjects,
• Discovering Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s) and Key Developmental Arrests in childhood, discovering the things we needed to learn in childhood that we didn’t even know we needed to learn,
• Inner Child work, exploring the unmet needs of the younger version of ourselves that hold us back in adulthood,
• Emotional flashback awareness and management,
• Developing emotional literacy and deeper meta-awareness,
• Self-reparenting, discovering inner blocks to promoting our own well-being, and making a commitment to meet those inner needs.