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V.A.D.M. Centre for Ethnic Minority Mental Health

Sometimes, when we are feeling emotionally distressed, experiencing psychological turmoil, struggling with a dilemma that you are finding difficult to resolve for yourself, or just plan fed-up, we find it difficult to function within the context of our everyday lives. Everything seems like a chore; and we can not find a way out of inner turmoil. VADM Centre for Ethnic Minority Mental Health can help. Why not take time-out of your busy schedule to speak to someone:

VADM CEMMH Counselling & Psychotherapy Service

We have a wide range of experience of working with different people of different ages, from a variety of different backgrounds, and this proves invaluable in helping and supporting people to work through whatever is giving rise to their emotional distress. Counselling and psychotherapy can help you by:

Ø Offering a supportive and caring relationship in which you can feel safe and secure enough to explore any issue you might bring at your own pace;

Ø Accepting whatever you might bring to the counselling session without judgment or prejudice;

Ø Helping and supporting you to see your difficulties more objectively;

Ø Helping and supporting you to express your thoughts and feelings in safe and secure environment, and come to terms with new or past experiences;

Ø Being a constructive part of an evolving process whereby unwanted thoughts, feelings, and attitudes can be changed;

Ø Helping to build self esteem, and enabling you to take greater control over your life;

Ø Helping to improve communication in an assertive and constructive way; as opposed to an aggressive or confrontational way;

Ø Helping you to become more aware of the possibilities and the limitations of your existence, and set more realistic goals for the future.

If you believe counselling and psychotherapy is one way of dealing constructively with your experience of anxiety/stress, depression; abusive relationships; addiction; discrimination, identity issues or personality issues, and social dysfunction, then we may be able to help you. If we can’t, then I will help you find someone else who may be able to help you.

What is counselling and psychotherapy?

Counselling and psychotherapy is a process of human interaction between two or more people where the primary purpose is to understand each other through clarification and description of events/situations experienced within the context of an individual’s everyday life. The counsellor and the client may identify other outcomes as something that you want to get out of counselling; however the primary purpose is for the client to understand how she or he responds to everyday experience and work out how best to respond given the prevailing circumstances. Counselling may be a short process or a long process, and the client will get to decide with your counsellor just how long that process with be. The content of that process will be categorised, and priorities outlined before the counselling process starts in earnest. The counsellor will set the boundaries within which the counselling process should proceed, and offer you, the client, the opportunity to say whether or not the help and support that being offered, is something that you, the client, wants to invest in.

What is the difference between counselling and psychotherapy?

Well I not sure there is a lot of difference; except, perhaps the length of training that psychotherapists undertake, and the price people are prepared to pay a psychotherapist as opposed to a counsellor. In any case, clients have told me over the years that they are more interested in meeting a counsellor or psychotherapist who has experience of dealing with whatever the issue/problem is, and is willing to work with the client to help resolve these issues. Others however want to be assured that practitioner has the relevant qualifications and accreditations before they part with their money, and you can’t blame them for that either. I think I would be one of the latter, in that I would want to know something about what I will be getting for my money before I part with it, and different people have different preference. I think if you happy with the practitioner, then you tend to feel as if your getting value for money whatever the cost.

Theoretical Approach

As an organisation, we have broad of knowledge of most counselling and psychotherapeutic approaches, but we tend towards the more integrative approaches. For instance, the model used may combine ‘Existential Philosophy and Practice’, with ‘Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT)’ and Object Relations to create a personal way of working with emotional distress. This integrative model or ‘Existential CBT Model’ allows for the deconstruction and clarification of the client's narrative to uncover the client’s own sedimentations of thought, feeling, attitudes, and actions-in-the-world, and then to construct hypotheses within the ‘Antecedent, Behaviour, and Consequences’ framework of CBT model which can then be tested. I find that this model allows the freedom to accept the information as presented by clients, and the ability to analyse it without being too deterministic and rigid in my approach.

The information inherent in the client’s narrative stories are encountered within the context of the therapeutic setting, and reflect his or her ways of being-in-the-world in an explorative and descriptive fashion, (i.e., phenomenologically). Together, the Client and the counsellor are committed to the nature of our encounter, and this is achieved through sharing views, opinions, and beliefs about being in the world. Anxiety, stress, loneliness, anger and despair are just a few of feelings that we all struggle with within the context of our everyday lives, and the work that takes place during therapy will focus on seeking authenticity in relation through self examination, reflection, and critical thinking. Our time will be taken up with the struggle between the authentic and the inauthentic. Together we will identify the possibilities and limitations of interrelatedness between and within concomitant beliefs/thoughts and subsequent emotions and actions. Your experiences will provide the contextual framework within which exploration, clarification, description, and understanding can take place.

In the process, we get to ‘know’ something of the way you, the client, have applied yourself within the context of your everyday life, and hence, is likely to apply yourself in the future. It is hoped that, you, the client will then grasps the opportunity to choose ‘how’ you will apply yourself in the future, differently.

To find whether individual counselling and psychotherapy is for you, please contact me for an appointment:

VADM Counselling and Psychotherapy Service

Current Interests:

Ø Deriving Theory to explain Juxtaposition of Powerlessness and Social Exclusion

Ø Developing an Existential Object Relations Cognitive-Behavioural Model For Counselling and Psychotherapy

Favourite Links

Ø International Society of Professional Counsellors

Ø Asian and Black Counsellors and Psychotherapists

Ø Organisations providing support for BME people

Ø Black Net

Ø Black and Minority Ethnic Research Panel

Last revised: 14^th, December 2009.