Helen Stewart

LOCATION: Palmeira Square and online
AVAILABILITY: Monday afternoons
PRICE: £50 per session/ £30 for introductory session
SPECIALISMS:
Anxiety & depression
Grief & loss
Self-esteem & identity
Relationship & family issues
Difficult life transitions or life crises
Emotional, physical, or sexual abuse
Trauma & recovery
Understanding & managing anger
Addiction of all types
Coping with injury or illness
Assertiveness & decision making

Training

Helen has a diploma in Therapeutic Counselling, a certificate in Person-Centred Experiential Counselling for Depression (PCE-CfD), and a post-graduate certificate in Psychology. She is an accredited member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).

Alongside private practice, Helen works part-time as a counsellor for the NHS. She has been part of this talking therapies team since 2015 and has completed in-house CBT training.

Experience

Helen is a person-centred counsellor which means she works with an understanding that you have a natural self that you want to be in harmony with, but your difficult experiences have interrupted this connection, however her training was integrative, which means she can draw on other approaches to meet your individual needs

Helen works with adults of all ages (18 to 90+), from all walks of life, with all sorts of difficulties.

Before practising as a counsellor, Helen worked for many years in the media and tech industry as a subtitler, trainer and operations manager and understands the challenges of the business world.

She will provide a confidential space for you to tell your story. It is a safe and supportive place too where she will listen to you with warmth and compassion. She will focus on what it’s like to be you, the challenges you face, and the changes that you want to make.

Helen will help you to explore who you are and how your difficulties have affected you. She will offer reflections and pose questions to help you find your way and discover your own solutions. Her hope is that counselling will help you to trust yourself more so that you feel empowered to make the changes in your life that feel right for you.

Anxiety & depression

We experience physical symptoms of anxiety like a racing heart, tight chest or churning stomach when we are faced with a threat. The adrenaline kicks in and spurs us into action to either fight this threat or run away from it so that we can survive. Sometimes we are not actually in danger but feel threatened by what is happening in our lives, or worried about the threat of what might happen, and we can feel overwhelmed with fear, panic, and stress alongside these symptoms. If you feel like this, Helen can help you to manage your symptoms of anxiety and work on identifying and understanding your fears so that you are better able to face them in the future.

Feeling sad or low in life is normal but when feelings of hopelessness and despair take over, depression can immobilise you and everything can just seem pointless and joyless. There may be very understandable reasons for this that you can’t see or perhaps blame yourself for. By talking about your experience of depression, Helen can help you to get in touch with and express the emotions underlying your depression so that you can make sense of how you feel and discover new ways of looking at yourself and your world, and work towards making positive changes in your life.

Helen has worked for many years in the NHS with clients experiencing anxiety & depression.

Bereavement & adjustment to loss

Bereavement can turn your world upside down and leave you feeling lost and alone. Grieving is a natural and very individual process but maybe you find yourself stuck with complicated feelings or reacting in unexpected ways. Perhaps you have experienced loss in its many other forms – relationship breakdown, loss of health or employment, for example – and are struggling to come to terms with what has happened. Helen can help you to explore your loss and work with new meanings that emerge as you move to a place of adjustment and acceptance.

Helen is experienced in working with complex grief and began her training in this area with Cruse Bereavement Care.

Self-esteem & identity

Feeling worthless and being relentlessly self-critical can be devastating. It can hinder your life choices and damage your relationships with others and, of course, yourself. There may be significant and traumatic past experiences that have impacted you and then left you with chronic feelings of low self-esteem. Helen can help you to understand and challenge this from a place of self-compassion. At the same time, perhaps you’ve never been sure of who you really are or feel confused and unhappy about who you have become compared to who you used to be. Helen can help you to untangle this web and work with finding and restoring your identity so that you feel more self-confident.

Other information

Helen enjoys therapeutic writing (journalling, poetry, letter writing) and encourages clients to try this too as a tool for self-expression in counselling. Sometimes we can be stuck for words and not know what to say. If this happens, Helen likes to work creatively with images or pictures that come to mind or somatic responses that you feel in your body.