What that means for anxiety counselling in Derby?
I’m not going to try and talk you out of your anxiety, or hand you a worksheet of positive thoughts to replace the anxious ones. Anxiety rarely responds well to being argued with, and if that worked, you’d probably have done it yourself by now.
Instead, the work is slower and more honest than that. We spend time actually understanding what your anxiety is doing and why, what it’s still protecting you from, what happens in your body a half second before your thoughts even catch up. As a person-centred counsellor, I don’t bring a fixed programme to that, there’s no set number of weeks or a tick box process to work through. It’s your pace, and it stays that way throughout.
People often ask whether this is the same as CBT, it isn’t. CBT tends to work directly with thoughts and behaviours in a structured, often time limited way. This is different, less about correcting the thinking, more about understanding the pattern underneath it, so change happens because something’s actually shifted, not because you’ve learned to override yourself more successfully. People also ask whether they need to know what’s causing the anxiety before they start, you don’t. Plenty of people arrive with no clear cause in mind at all, and working that out is often part of what happens here, not a prerequisite for beginning.
