How we can help:

The ABCs of problems and solutions which can be helped with E-CENT counselling, coaching and therapy include the following:

We can help with a whole range of issues, problems and challenges, such as:

Anger: Our approach to counselling, coaching and psychotherapy teaches that anger is sometimes appropriate and sometimes inappropriate.  But how do you know which is which? The E-CENT approach to anger management will give you the answers.

Anxiety: We teach you a whole-body-brain-mind approach to reduce your anxiety, worry and panic, and to keep it under control.

Assertive communication is important at home and in work or business, as it produces cooperation and better outcomes.

Attachment is something that occurs to every baby.  We become securely or insecurely attached to our mothers (or main carers).  When we become insecurely attached, this often results in unhappy, insecure relationships later in life, in marriage and couple relationships in general. But our attachment style can be changed in curative relationships, including with an attachment counsellor.

Attitudes: Our attitudes have a huge impact on how we interpret what happens to us; without in any way suggesting that what happens to us is not in itself good or bad. When bad things happen, and we have a strong coping attitude, we can weather the storm better than if we have weaker, or more negative, attitudes.  Those attitudes are non-conscious, but can be explored in counselling and therapy.

Behaviour therapy: We use some elements of behaviour therapy, integrated with emotional processing and re-thinking and re-framing of problems.

Beliefs: We all know how powerful religious and political beliefs are, and how hard they are to change.  Well, our personal beliefs, embedded in our stories and life-scripts, are just as powerful, and E-CENT counselling is designed to help you to shift your beliefs from depowering to empowering, and from negative to positive.

CBT: Our approach includes thinking strategies, and behavioural approaches; but we are decidedly post-CBT, and part of the ’emotive revolution’: including Affect regulation theory, and Interpersonal neurobiology (IPN).

Conditional self-acceptance, as in accepting yourself regardless of your incompetence, so long as you are striving to be a moral person.  Our system of counselling teaches a moral form of radical self-acceptance.

Confidence or self-belief has a lot to do with what you expect from your life, what you go after in terms of life goals, and how to relate to significant others in your life.

Cutting the Ties: It is normal and natural to begin life in a dependent state – dependent upon your mother and father (or main carers) – but we all need to achieve autonomy as we enter our teenage years.  However, many of us get to be middle-aged and still find ourselves in dysfunctional relationships with unhelpful parents. To cope with this problem, we run a ‘puberty rite’, or ‘rite of passage’, to help such clients to free themselves, especially from particularly negative or controlling parental influences, and to become autonomous and free.

DBT: Some clients see a similarity between our system of counselling and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, because of our emphasis upon Mindfulness. Distress tolerance. Emotion regulation. and Interpersonal effectiveness.  And our system is broader than DBT; because of our emphasis upon the body, diet, exercise, and so on.

Depression: Our system of counselling teaches a whole-body-brain-mind approach to overcoming depression, in which food plays a key role, alongside exercise, and better mind-management strategies, in the absence of any medication.

Desensitization. In E-CENT counselling we have developed a very powerful system for desensitizing you to your earlier life traumas.

Diet and digestion: We point you towards educational sources of information on the kinds of foods that reduce emotional over-reactions or under-reactions.

EMDR: We include a small element of eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing withing our desensitisation process.

Emotional overreactions: We have all had them; and they cost us dearly.  We can teach you how to regulate your emotions so they are not too over the top, and not too understated!

Exercise: Sedentary activity is killing people.  And regular physical exercise can help to enhance your health.  But some forms of exercise a are better than others, especially for emotional wellbeing.

Feelings and moods: We teach a range of strategies for controlling your feelings and moods.

Goals: Do you know how to set and pursue your self-determined goals?  If not, E-CENT counselling could be very helpful to you.

Gratitude, and its link to happiness.  Gratitude is one of a range of virtues that we teach, and we show that it will benefit you to make these changes.

Gut problems: These are now strongly linked to brain-mind malfunctions, according to several recent studies from respectable scientific sources.

Happiness: How to achieve it; how to avoid unworkable strategies.  We counsel you towards realistic levels of personal happiness within the context of your relationships.

Havening: We include Havening as one of three processes we use within our desensitisation process.

Health: Health is the real wealth.  Nobody can give it to you.  You get it as your birth-right, and then have to learn how to hang on to it.  We have studied this area in considerable detail and can share our learning with you.

Jealousy: The green-eyed monster.  How to reduce it.

Love and sex-love relationships: Our system of counselling, coaching and therapy teaches 18 principles that help you to build wonderfully fulfilling relationships.

Moods: Background moods affect the emotions that emerge in difficult situations.  We teach you to control your moods by managing your lifestyle better.

Mania: What goes up must come down.  Better to find a happy medium.  This can be done by altering your beliefs and expectations, and also altering certain aspects of your lifestyle.

Meditation: Meditation is a form of mental relaxation, and detachment from worry and anxiety.  It can enhance your physical and mental wellbeing, if practised frequently and regularly.

Narratives: The stories you tell yourself, including those you took over from your family of origin, and from your wider culture, most often set severe limits on the possibilities of your personal growth and your life chances.  But narrative therapy can help you to revise those stories, and to include a vision of a better future for yourself.

Nervousness is an expression of anxiety: Our system of counselling offers a comprehensive range of strategies for reducing nervousness and anxiety.

Nutrition: The foods that you eat can support your ‘mental health’, or emotional wellbeing, or undermine it.  Nutritional counselling is a growing trend among mental health professionals.

One-conditional self-acceptance: It would be immoral to accept yourself totally as you are, even if you are acting immorally or unethically.  But it would be equally wrong to damn yourself for acting incompetently, or for using poor judgement.  We teach you how to distinguish between what is acceptable human behaviour, morally, and what should be extinguished; and in the process, how to accept yourself very much more than you currently do!

Overreactions whether emotional or behavioural normally result from a history of poor lifestyle choices. Our system of counselling teaching a viable lifestyle approach, which keeps your emotions and behavioural tendencies on an even keel.

Planning, as in life planning, goal planning and pursuit. E-CENT counselling has a range of strategies for this area of self-management.

Relationship skills: We teach a range of principles for the building of happy relationships.

Relaxation: We teach specific relation techniques, which you can quickly learn and use in your daily life.

Self-esteem and self-confidence: We counsel our clients to rate themselves realistically, and non-egotistically, and to build their confidence upon a set of solid values.

Stress: this is not ‘all in the mind’.  It is a whole body-brain-mind-environment complex.  We counsel our clients to manage the balance between their coping strategies and the pressures and strains in their daily lives.

Self-assertion: If you do not know the distinction between passive, aggressive and assertive behaviour, then, most likely, you will flip between the passive approach and the aggressive approach – or perhaps you are constantly aggressive.  Neither of these strategies will serve you well, and E-CENT counselling can teach you to balance your relationships with others so they are more egalitarian and more productive, and consequently more enjoyable.

Thinking skills: Most thinking occurs as the level of perception, according to Dr Edward de Bono.  That means, most of us are going around responding automatically to the things which happen to us.  That is not real thinking; and it is certainly not flexible and helpful thinking.  E-CENT counselling incorporates a range of strategies for improving thinking skills in our clients.

Traumatic experiences and desensitization: We have evolved a comprehensive strategy for reducing trauma in our clients.  This normally names about four or five sessions, at 45 minutes per session, to produce a significant change in the level of traumatization of the client from 10/10 to 1 or 2 or of 10.

Virtue ethics and emotional wellness: E-CENT counselling is perhaps the only system of counselling, coaching and psychotherapy which has ethics and moral philosophy built into our core system of thought.  This helps our clients to know how to engage in defensible approaches to power relations at home and at work.

Wellness, emotional and physical: Many people see their medical practitioner first for advice regarding physical wellness, and often also for emotional wellness.  Some of them then consult us for additional information about how to happy and healthy in body and mind.  We have some educational resources in this area.

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This has been a quick ABC outline of some of the areas of counselling, coaching and psychotherapy with which we can help you.

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For further information, please email either

Jim: jim.byrne@abc-counselling.org;

or

Renata: renata@abc-counselling.org

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Because we are body-brain-mind-environment-wholes, it is important to focus on the foundations of what keeps us physically and emotionally healthy – like a healthy diet, regular physical exercise, and so on.  But do not overlook the simplest change that produces the biggest impact on your body-brain-mind: correct breathing:

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