— Connecting with oneself
Counselling
— Guidance
End-of-Life Doula
Assisting terminal patients and their families in processing the inevitable, and offering guidance in the arrangements before, during and after.
- This is an in-person service at the clients’ home or hospital, in and around the Pretoria area
- The initial date, time and place will be arranged on the registration
- R790 per session, plus travelling costs
- The sessions are between 90-minutes and 2-hours
- The duration depends on the client’s needs
- In Afrikaans or English
What to expect
A doula serves as a grief counsellor, and someone to advise about what to expect and all the arrangements that need to be made.
For a terminal patient, a doula could be someone to talk with about God, about your fears and regrets, about the good times, and about what will be lost and what will not be. To the family, a doula can be someone to bring the family together, calm them and get to say what needs to be said.
A doula can’t give you the answers you may be looking for and can’t solve the problems created over generations. It is about not being lonely, being heard, and about connecting families.
— One-on-one attention
Personal Counselling
Counselling provides a safe space for emotional support, understanding and guidance to those who are facing various life challenges, or having upsetting issues or concerns. It involves self-exploration and self-discovery, to gain insight into your patterns of behaviour, beliefs and motivations.
Even though we may offer a lot of resources and knowledge, know that counselling is not about giving advice or solving your problem for you. The best we can do is to give you skills to calm you and make you realise you are safe, and then use our skills to help you work through your problem so that you become more resilient to deal with life yourself.
- Online or in person sessions at the counsellor’s consulting rooms, depending on the counsellor selected
- The length of a session and cost may vary from 50-minutes to 1-hour-45-minutes, at R390 to R790 per session, depending on the counsellor selected
- The usual duration is between 4 and 12 sessions per issue addressed
- In Afrikaans or English
What to expect
Counselling is about self-awareness and personal growth. It is about keeping you safe while you are experiencing the present moment. It is about accepting your feelings as normal – just allowing it to be – and then looking at it from a different point of view. It is about being curious, with no criticism or judgement. It is about exploring your beliefs, values and behaviours; considering the degree to which you created your thought patterns around the experience. It is about realising the areas, the concepts or the time frame you are fused with and not willing let go of yet.
Through psycho-education, you may come to realise that what you are feeling is normal. It may be because of how the human brain and body works, how society and your family created who you are, and how your world keep you where you are.
Counselling may help you realise reality for what it is. It helps you to take ownership and control, and make the changes in your life you knew you have to make. It is about being more resilient and expanding your window of tolerance. It is about being confident and courageous, even in the face of pain and fear. Counselling is a reflective, validating and empowering experience, where you find courage and the strength to act on your own solutions.
From a trauma-informed perspective, counsellors see anxiety, depression, addictions, abuse, paranoia, etc., as symptoms and coping mechanisms to pain and fear – not as problems needed to be fixed. We do counselling so that we may have a look at what it is you really are experiencing underneath the obvious and what you are gaining from the situation. It is about being brutally honest with yourself, and figuring out for yourself where you want to go from here.
In your own time, you may learn to think and behave differently, so that even when normal emotions of fear and pain come up, you could be functional and deal with life.
In this process, the client is the driving force behind the change, where the client’s commitment, willingness, needs and objectives guide the therapeutic journey.
— Counselling for children
Play-based Intervention
Play is the way children communicate with a world they do not understand; when they don’t have the words to say what they need to say.
- Specialist counsellors offering one-on-one intervention to toddlers and children through play
- In-person sessions at the counsellor’s consulting rooms
- The length of a session is about 50-minutes and cost may vary from R390 to R790 per session, depending on the counsellor selected
- The usual duration is between 4 and 12 sessions per issue addressed
- In Afrikaans or English
What to expect
Children under the age of 10 require a special kind of approach to deal with the pain left by trauma and loss. They struggle to make sense of what happened because they don’t understand time, death, causality, permanence, and the like. They don’t have an identity formed yet and they don’t understand boundaries. Because they don’t have the ability to ‘fight’ or ‘flee’ when in danger, they ‘freeze’ and dissociate to numb the pain.
A child does not have the words to express their feelings. Secondly, language and the related part of the brain that allows for reasoning and understanding, have not developed yet.
A traumatic event or any kind of loss (be it from a death, a divorce or even moving to a strange new place), poses a direct threat to the child’s sense of safety, and to his/her sources of love and attachment. This is because a child has no power to influence or control his/her environment or what may be coming next.
Children need special attention, because trauma and grief will have a direct impact on how they perceive themselves and the world they live in.
The parents are often involved with the intervention-process. This may be during the child’s session or with separate sessions, as the parent is the attachment figure that will be dealing with the child on a daily basis.
— Relational intervention
Couples & Family Counselling
It’s important to note that the impact of the trauma or loss is often felt within our relationships with the significant people in our lives.
It’s within these relationships that the stress and pain is exacerbated, or the load lightened. These are our attachment figures with whom we feel safe enough to say and think and feel and act without restraint. It’s unfortunate that our internal pain often spill over and hurt these people we love.
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- Online or in person sessions at the counsellor’s consulting rooms, depending on the counsellor selected
- The length of a session and cost is around 50-minutes, at R590 to R890 per session, depending on the counsellor selected
- The usual duration is between 4 and 12 sessions per issue addressed
- In Afrikaans or English
What to expect
When dealing with trauma and/or loss, the couples & family counselling focus on the relationship between everyone involved and how each is dealing with the event on their own. It follows a systemic approach that may at times include the historic, cultural, generational or family issues that linger underneath the pain and fear.
— About the Other Side
Spiritual Counselling
Spiritual counselling examine questions like the meaning of life, why we are here, out-of-body & near-death experiences, life-between-lives, past lives & reincarnation, spiritual beings and about what is awaiting us on the other side.
- Online or in person sessions at the counsellor’s consulting rooms, depending on the counsellor selected
- The length of a session and cost may vary from 50-minutes to 1-hour-45-minutes, at R390 to R790 per session, depending on the counsellor selected
- The usual duration is between 4 and 12 sessions per issue addressed
- In Afrikaans or English
What to expect
The spiritual counsellor will focus on expanding the client’s awareness of the spiritual world. Counsellors are just normal people with some knowledge and understanding of what is happening on “the other side”. Counsellors are not religiously prescriptive or involved in religious movements, cults or churches. Counsellors are also not psychics, mediums or channellors, and will not be able to give readings.
Note that spiritual counselling is not about traditional beliefs, religion or questions about the Bible, Tanakh or Quran. If you need to hold on to your traditions in order to feel safe or what your church is prescribing, it may be best to seek a minister, pastor, priest, rabbi or imam for advice.