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Frequently Asked Questions
I offer 1:1 sessions @ $150 for about an hour. I’m not overly strict on timing, allowing extra room for the work that needs to happen.
I suggest about 6 sessions minimum, in order to allow time to dig under the layers. Having said that, a few sessions may be all you need and ultimately it’s up to you and your experience as to how many sessions we do.
I work with couples @ $190 an hour, using Emotionally Focussed Therapy (EFT) as my framework.
More Info
A bit more on what to expect
Sessions take place either online or in my Counselling room in Currimundi, which is setup with couches and creative resources that support the process. My approach is conversational and I trust and notice that what arrives in conversation tends to provide direction and content to explore. I use your current experience, whether feelings of anxiety or specific relationship issues, to provide a structure and direction for our sessions. In approaching each person this way, it becomes centred around your unique set of circumstances and personality.
What’s the difference between Counsellors and Psychologists?
Seeing a counsellor means stepping into a space focused on personal growth, life challenges, relationships, emotions, and meaning-making. Counsellors don’t diagnose or pathologise; the work is more relational, reflective and exploratory - a conversation oriented toward understanding your inner world and supporting change from the inside out. A psychologist, on the other hand, is trained to assess, diagnose and treat mental health conditions using evidence-based clinical frameworks. Sessions may include structured interventions, diagnostic tools, and treatment plans aimed at specific symptoms or disorders. Both are helpful and can be seen simply as different doors into support. Counselling tends to feel more experiential and human-centred; psychology is more clinical and diagnostic. The best fit depends on what kind of support you are seeking.
Does it hurt?!
A lot of people avoid Counselling and I wonder if that’s partly out of not knowing what it is or what to expect. So, a bit of ‘fear of the unknown’ – which is fair enough. I notice that there is a fair bit of trepidation because people rightly expect to uncover things that are uncomfortable, and as a result have been kept at arms length. We can and do meet some raw emotional content and things we’d rather forget, which is challenging and I see that it takes courage to lean into things we’d rather not. In short, we avoid things that cause us pain – that’s logical and sensible! But with our life experiences, it turns out that avoiding certain things can turn out to harm us in other ways. What I’m saying is, yes, it can be difficult and stir up painful memories and emotions, but this is always done in a considered and structured way. I use frameworks that are about being with difficult material as briefly as possible in order to ultimately bring relief, unburdening and a lot more ease. But it seems we have to go through the fire and unfortunately there isn’t a sneaky shortcut.
What is my Unique Selling Point?
My Unique Selling Point. I should work on snappy marketing branding for this, but in the meantime, this is who I am.: I bring a calm, steady presence into the room. I tend to create an atmosphere where people feel at ease, unhurried, and genuinely heard. I naturally look for a way to get to the root of a person’s issue. I listen deeply and help make sense of things by pointing out patterns and potential sources for what a person is dealing with. I intuitively utilise a number of different therapeutic modalities (frameworks and processes) to bring clarity and ultimately ease and increased agency. I don’t stick to a formula or set regimen as I see each interaction as unique and each person with a particular vocabulary and lens through which they make sense of the world – I latch onto and utilise each clients particular way of understanding. Its important to me to provide an environment that is solidly grounded because we are dealing with things that are unseeable, and therefore notoriously difficult to make sense of. Our inner experience is utterly personal and unique as well as difficult to language and ephemeral in nature. It often feels like learning a new language in a whole new world – the world of our hidden interior. I welcome all the parts of a person’s inner world and seek to support a person to make meaning of their life through their own experience.
A deeper dive into my influences, philosophy and process.
I have a background as a musician and have travelled a fair bit of the world as a performer. In some ways my music has always had an edge of consolation or healing and an invitation to reflect on our own story. I continue to perform and write poetry and will occasionally throw in a poem if it seems relevant. Creativity is, therefore, an important part of my Counselling approach. I am fascinated in the work of C.G. Jung – a key founding father of modern psychology, although he is largely ignored and avoided in modern psychological training. I suspect this is because he wasn’t afraid to allow the unknowable to be part of ‘analysis’ as he called his practice. His unashamed inclusion of spirituality and paranormal curiosity sees him relegated to the sidelines. I mention this as a way to highlight my embracing of spirituality, whatever that means! This is less a flippant statement and more of an understanding that we each have an experience of mystery, which I might call spirituality. Concretely, I’m referring to experiences in our lives that we can’t explain and seem ‘beyond coincidence’. How does this fit into our work? By allowing room for the ineffable and mystery, I notice how it becomes a co-pilot in uncovering things both of us may otherwise miss. Spirituality to me is the arena of Soul, which is equally difficult to describe. But let’s settle with my sense that our culture has lost its soul and humans along with it. I want to support the re-finding of soul – that part of us that offers a way to connect more deeply with others and the world at large. Like Jung, I use the wisdom of mythology as shared by many cultures. I utilise the power of archetypes to illustrate experiences of clients and embed them into a larger historical context. Ie. we aren’t the first to wrestle and wonder and struggle with being human! I am also a big fan of dreams and the utility of the insights that dreams can offer to us. I see, like Jung, that dreams provide direct access to what he called the ‘collective unconscious’ – which is like having access to all the wisdom of the world from the beginning of time! I believe its possible to harness the power of our imagination and use this space, that we inhabited so freely as children, to reset, and recover our sense of our potential and new possibilities. All of these plus our modern evidence based modalities such as IFS, CBT and Narrative Therapy coalesce into our shared experience.