Adsum Counselling

Never been to counselling before?

What to expect...

Photo Credit: Thea Jardine

What is counselling like?

Counselling is a collaborative process. Clients bring to the therapeutic space those difficulties that are causing issues in their lives. Each session offers a safe, confidential space to explore these challenging stresses, emotions, or experiences. Counsellors work to build this safety with the client by modeling trust, respect, and empathy.

Training and experience allow counsellors to offer different perspectives. This new light can enhance understanding, allowing clients to find strategies for coping or shifting the challenges that bother them. The goal of the process is greater well-being, empowerment, and self-worth.

Change usually comes when the client identifies the feelings, thoughts, behaviours, and experiences that are acting as barriers to their goals. There is no single right answer in therapy! A counselor is non-judgmental and refrains from bringing an agenda into the process.

Is counselling right for me?

There are many strategies and approaches to counselling. In the movies, therapy is often portrayed as people lying on a couch talking to the ceiling, or as a drastic intervention for those with extreme PTSD. This can make prospective clients worry that the whole process isn’t right for them. If you’ve made it to this page but are still not sure whether therapy is right for you, here’s a fabulous article on selecting a therapist and what to expect.

What types of therapy does Adsum offer?

At Adsum, our approach contains a mixture of up-to-date, well-researched strategies, all of which are effective tools for change. We offer these tools as a guide and support, but it is our clients who take the tools and work with them in their daily lives. Clients are encouraged to build what works for them. Adsum incorporates tools and resources from a variety of different types of counselling including; mindfulness, Gottman (Relationship therapy), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Committment Therapy (ACT), Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Narrative, Somatic, and Art.

Our basic approach and foundational training is in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). In this approach, clients are encouraged to observe the ways they think about things. Making conscious choices about thoughts and behaviours can sometimes help people shift difficulties that feel stuck.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), has been shown effective for those processing trauma and anxiety. These sessions are a little different than standard talk therapy, using eye movements to calm the client’s emotional responses to challenging memories.

Note: The end of the EMDR and attachment videos below contain promotional materials from their creators.

Adsum Counselling does not endorse these materials.

Attachment-Focused Therapy At Adsum we are trained in a variety of attachment-based approaches including Gottman and Attachment-Focused EMDR. Attachment wounds can disrupt a person's ability to develop and maintain healthy relationships. Understanding attachment wounds and how they can lead to difficulties understanding and communicating needs and boundaries are essential to learning to recognize and heal interpersonal relationships (friends, family, partners, co-workers).

Here is an interesting article on Attachment: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/attachment-disorder-in-adults

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