Relate Trained Counsellorsfor Relationship Counselling and Marriage Guidance
in Leeds and Wakefield, West Yorkshire

Face to face appointments are available

Our face to face connections are based on a 60 minute sessions at a cost of £60 for individuals and £70 for couples and are paid for in advance by either debit or credit card currently only in our Horbury offices although online zoom sessions are available as well as telephone appointments.

Counsellors and Therapists accredited face to face training at reasonable prices

We can also deliver the training at your own premises if that is more helpful for your colleagues, groups of six or more, Counsellors or clients. We provide therapy training in Wakefield and Leeds and our 10th year anniversary has seen our Couple training course being revamped as well as adding innovative new CPD to the program. My specialist knowledge in working with couples which has been gained in offering couples therapy over last 20 years is always a favorite course.

If your looking to extend your counselling knowledge and would like to access quality accredited training then please contact me or look at my training web site www.iwtc.org.uk.

Past comment “Excellent delivery from someone who was well experienced in the field, who addressed questions appropriately whilst also encouraging us all in our own capacities”

Our New Podcast channel

Our new Podcast can be viewed here with lots of interesting topics discussed and helpful ways to help understand the human dynamic with ways to achieve better communication and connections view it here

Consultations are available by zoom or via Phone

If you arn't able to attend a session in person and would like help and support then we offer counselling with Clients either by Zoom or on the phone , for a fee of £60 per session for individuals and £70 for couples, if you feel more comfortable to access your therapy in this way and not meeting face to face or cannot travel to access our services and can use a computer or the phone, maybe your life is too busy then please give us a call.

Relate trained Counsellors providing therapy services in Leeds and the West Yorkshire area

We are Relate trained and are specialists in Relationship therapy. We work with all the issues that Couples, Families and Individuals can experience. Life can change at any time and its these changes that make the relationships we have hard to connect to and work with. The changes that we the Counsellors can work with are:

• Marriage Guidance
• Marriage difficulties
• Having children
• Change of careers
• Financial difficulties
• Bereavement
• Affairs
• Divorce
• Redundancy
• Retirement
• Sexual Intimacy
• In fact anything that happens which can be hard to live with and creates distancing between Couples, friends and families.
  
  Our Counsellor's work with Couples, Individuals and Families on an open-ended basis or for an agreed time period, with the aim of enabling you to enhance your life and to live it more fully. We don't commit you to attending weekly or having a number of sessions, we work it on a session by session process, your in charge of the counselling contract.
  
  Our practices are within easy reach of Leeds and Wakefield transport links.

   

Does life feel like life is getting on top of you or you cant find a way forward?

Do you feel lonely or afraid?
Are you arguing and finding it hard to communicate?
Is your relationship not making you happy?
Do you always feel like you cant do anything right?
Are you starting a relationship and wanting to make sure it works?
Are your relationships always breaking down?
Do you have behaviors which don't help your relationships?

Then we could help

Could you benefit from a session with a Counsellor to take some time-out with one of our Relate trained Consultants?

... to explore your thoughts and feelings
... to get back on a front foot again
... to help understand your world
... to find support when times are tough

Our Relate trained Consultants collectively have over 90 years experience previously within Relate in counselling Couples, Families and Individuals. They are fully trained by Relate and all Counsellors are experienced to deliver the work they do. Each has been practicing as Counsellors for a minimum of 10 years. They are all committed to providing counselling (and psychotherapy?) in a safe, confidential and non-judgmental environment and confirm to BACP or other statutory bodies ethics and policies.

We are experienced in helping Individual clients who have experienced difficulties with :

• Stress
• Relationships
• Panic Attacks
• Anxiety
• Bereavement
• Redundancy
• Depression,
• Sexual issues
• Gender Issues
• Addiction
• Mental health
• Trauma

   

Have the life you want not the one you think you deserve.

Insecurity drives all of us in our interactions and interventions during our life. It causes us to reshape and redesign what we think, feel and do in our thoughts, words and deeds. This insecure drive is part of our DNA mind programming and we refer back to it for most of our decisions within everyday life. It’s something which we find hard to detach from and take control of. When we have conflict or issues around our relationships with others then we tend to reflect on our situation from an insecure position and then interact with others in a defending way, sometimes using words to create distance from our decisions or actions. This may involve telling lies or fabricating the truth, causing arguments, running away, using deflective behaviour patterns, such as drinking, drugs, sex, isolation or maybe other self-harming ways. If we can understand our insecure patterns of behaviour then we can try to change our actions and reactions to others. It’s hard to do this in the moment, especially when the fight or flight drives are in motion, we would need to do this in a calm and reflective way usually by ourselves or within therapy.
If you can understand where these drives originate and how they impact on your life then you can understand how to implement strategies in order to reduce the effect they have on you.
As an example would be that if you grew up the relationship with Father who was very detached and you were always trying to get a connection with him, usually in a negative way which did not help. presuming he did not want you around and that the distance you had was a criticism of the things you achieved academically, not being interested in your school work or your interactions with the schooling process. This could make you believe you were thick, a perception not a reality. This insecurity perception could drive you to not engage with schooling and as much as possible not gain any academic foundation. So growing up may find you going into jobs which were lower grade to what you could have possibly achieved. But then your skills on learning and being able to see positive outcomes from muddle and confusion, seeing the clear path through things and implementing solutions to problems could help you to progress through work roles. This may never have involved any academic interaction, no tests or academic results, learning on the job so to speak. This would stand you well throughout your formative years and helping to challenge some of the insecurity issues, building confidence in what you had achieved. Insecurity, as always, would be purring in the background, like a piece of software on a computer which was hidden in the program, it would still inform your interactions with others.
I you challenged that view a somewhat scary process, by attending college and maybe later university you would see that indeed you had an academic brain and could relate to engaging with learning at a higher level than you ever thought possible.
This experience and journey may help you to understand, challenge and beat the insecure perception which had been allowed to fester, helping to engage with learning and understand the insecure drives which had informed you for so long. Connecting with these drives trying to understand them more and engage with them so that you can be in charge of them and use them to challenge your perceived world based on those historical ideals and notions. This knowing and challenging process of your insecure drives would make living within the world much easier to engage with, in a positive and productive way, you would relate back to them less and as such be more in the driving seat then you ever had been before in your life and hopefully even more so in the future.

My new book, out on amazon, which is titled Insecurity “It’s all about Me” looks at these drives in much deeper detail and gives ways to help to engage with them and reduce the effect they have on us.

Have the life you want not the one your insecurity deems you should have.

Accredited local Courses being delivered in 2024

Parental workshop, "Helping to understand your young people"
Confidence and Self-esteem building
Understanding your emotions control them effectively
Counselling Skills training
Couple Counselling training extensive 5 day course

All these courses are delivered on-line and in our training rooms in Horbury near Wakefield. They can also be delivered at your premises for groups of a minimum of 6 people. Ask about our finders allowance scheme.

Ian offers extensive in-depth training courses for professionals, organisations and individuals. These can be delivered either at our venue or at your own offices and cover an extensive array of subjects and life issues. They vary from day courses on confidence self-esteem to seven day accredited programs training to be a Counsellor or a Couple Counsellor. These courses are regarded as extensive, successful and well delivered by all the attendees. He is a qualified teacher and builds bespoke programs for each Client group, no two training courses are the same, his attention to detail is what makes these courses popular and successful. His experience in delivering these courses to Local authorities, National organisations, Government and local charities has over 10 years of experience and successful feedback evidence can be supplied. Please contact him for supportive evidence and to discuss your needs to build a quality training program which works.

What is Counselling

This seems like an easy question to ask and in some ways it is.
Counselling/Therapy is a process in which people engage with to get to understand themselves or their lives and then to make choices in order to changes in that life.
The difficulty comes from choosing which type of counselling you would like to engage with to receive the right connection for you, dependant on how you work your world and the goals you would like to achieve will depend on who you choose.
If you’re not aware there are many types of counselling modalities which will engage in many ways and dependant on what you want to work with and how easy you can work things out for yourself will depend on which type of counselling suits you best. For example if you are a self-actualising person, you can usually sort things out without much of an interaction with others, then you may favour person centred counselling as this provides structure but small amounts of intervention. If you’re unable to find the reason for why your life is going wrong but know it is from your past negative incidences then you may favour psycho-dynamic counselling, looking at how the past interacts with the present.
Understanding the type of counselling the Therapist uses will help you to understand which Therapist may be more beneficial for you to engage with. Also the length of time you might want to engage with therapy will depend on who you choose as some practitioners can see you weekly for many years and others do short intervention work. An Integrative Therapist will use many forms of engaging theory in order to choose which one would be more appropriate for you, this may be beneficial if you are not sure of what you want. In talking to the Therapist these are the questions you need to ask them, how they work? What theory base do they use? What is the frequency of their sessions etc etc this then will build a picture of the person and if there are able not only to help you but also if they feel like the right person for you to work with, it is after all a relationship that we as Counsellors/Therapists enter into with you so you need to be able to trust us with your world.
Therapy can be very expensive so entering into it with a full awareness of what you and the therapist expects of each other, the contract, will make your journey more appropriate and beneficial.

What type of Therapy?

This is a question I get asked a lot in a sense of what type of therapy I use with my Clients. Asking what the type of therapy we use for our Clients really is a useful question to ask when you enquiring about entering a counselling process. The different types of therapy will use different approaches and the frequency of the sessions will be different, so questions which are useful are:
What theory base do you use?
How long do the sessions last?
How many sessions do you suggest I have?
Is it an ongoing contract i.e. never ends?
What will I get from the sessions?
These and more are the questions you should clarify before you make a decision to access any counselling or psycho-therapy contract. The usual answer I get when I ask the Client if they have accessed any previous counselling service, when it wasn’t deemed helpful, is that the type of counselling they accessed was the wrong one for them. For example you might be a person who doesn’t integrate well with others so group work would not usually be helpful, you might be a person who can’t self-actualise their thoughts, so just a listening process like person centred theory may not be helpful, you may not be able to see the Therapist weekly this might be something the Therapist needs to happen in order to deliver their work.
So ask any questions you need to ask before entering into the Counselling process.

Stay safe message and Self Care to Therapists

These strange times are something we will remember possibly for eternity, the time the earth stayed in. Its increase in a fear response will raise the anxieties of most people but undisputed the people who are already hypersensitive to anxiety. For these people as well as ourselves we need to realise that no matter what coping strategies we have helped them to use they may not fully work in these excessive times of lock-down.
We might wonder whether we can safely help people if we are also in an anxious state and we have to check our own needs and well-being first in order to help our Clients and be able to be fully congruent with them. We might be able to work on line or via the telephone and that may sustain us financially but again this must be balanced with our own mental and physical health, in so far as our natural drive is to help others, mostly that’s why we do this work. We do need to make sure we are fit enough to help others so that we can be fully able to engage with them if we doubt this for whatever reason then we have to ask ourselves if it is right to offer our work to Clients at this time.
Our natural empathy for our Clients would be to worry if they are able to cope without us, hopefully we are not the only support option they have in their lives. It’s natural to worry about them and the situation they might be in but to feel guilty about not being able to hold the session or support them due to our own issues will not really help them if we engage with them.
Find the space to heal yourself first, if needed, then when that is done offer sessions to your Clients so we may make it through this time and be there for them our friends, family, others and our new Clients in the future.