“Psychotherapy is a specific type of enriched environment that promotes social and emotional development, neural integration and the processing of complexity”. Cozolino
Counselling services for Sunshine Coast including Noosa, Sunshine Beach, Perigian Beach, Maroochydore, Buderim, Mooloolabah, Caloundra, Maleny, Montville, Mapleton and surrounding districts.
Counselling and Psychotherapy help clients to live well and grow in potential satisfaction in their worlds. This includes improving relationships with others, gaining relief from distressing emotions, as well as increasing self-esteem and satisfaction in all situations.
What is the difference between Counselling and Psychotherapy?
Although Counselling and Psychotherapy can overlap, there are differences.
Counselling focuses on enhancing people’s capacity to cope with specific life challenges such as anxiety, bereavement, relationship endings, reducing stress and improving well-being. Counselling also assists with problem solving and developing inner resources to help move on with life in meaningful ways.
Psychotherapy focuses on achieving change in the personality by attempting to help the client to positively reorganise negative experiences of themselves or others. Psychotherapy is an attempt to heal the “selfing”; how one emerges in their world. Often people notice that the nature of their personal difficulties is repetitive. Similar issues arise time and again in different contexts and relationships. Psychotherapy helps people achieve better self-understanding and change long standing patterns of behaviour that may be disrupting relationships, work and study.
Effective Counselling and Psychotherapy require the client and the therapist to enter into a mutual understanding of expectations and goals. These will be discussed with you at your first appointment.
Annie is a Clinical psychotherapist with clinical membership of Psychotherapists and Counsellors Federation of Australia and is the research chair on the Gestalt Australia & New Zealand Council. She participates in ongoing professional development in both Australia and Italy and is currently completing post graduate studies in clinical issues with the Italian Gestalt Institute.
In her work with clients, Annie aims to clarify their appreciation of themselves and their situation, exploring with them their current ways of experiencing their lives. Facing challenges with a supportive therapist can help transform suffering and aid us to grow in ways we may have not imagined.
Annie values an approach to counselling that supports transformation of suffering in the field, deeply respecting connection to ourselves and to others. She gently encourages an increased awareness which includes body awareness, awareness of our responses to others and our recognition of our interdependence in our situations. She does this by listening from a place of no agenda, holistically responding to her clients from a deep welcoming of their experiences. By inviting them to explore themselves and their situations at a pace that suits them, clients not only improve in their capacity to adjust to difficulties but also to gain greater satisfaction and joy.
Annie is able to work with a wide range of issues and works effectively alongside other interventions that include medication and post psychiatric care. The counselling and therapeutic support she offers is a path to live a more enriching, authentic and satisfying life .
The foundation of Gestalt therapy is based on supported radical acceptance and optimum awareness in the present moment. Together we practice being fully with you in this current moment; the experience of your current relationship to what is emerging in your situation. Greater awareness and the possibility of acceptance can lead to greater ability in your creative adjustment.
The Gestalt Approach to Change.
“Change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not.” Arnold Beisser
Change is always occurring. Being present with a wide angle lens on your situation allows for the unexpected solution to occur that best fits the whole of you in the whole situation.
A Here and Now Approach to Past Pain.
The past is remembered in the present. In the past you may have had little or no support for what you were seeing hearing and sensing. Bringing these sensations into the therapeutic awareness can promote a closure from lingering wounds and lacks of understanding thus allowing greater energy to be available for your present.
A Holistic Approach.
All of who you are is welcomed into the space in all your uniqueness.
Gestalt Therapy is Experimental.
Experiments are way to find out more information and widen your available understandings and choices as you make your way towards the relationships and adventures you seek.
Gestalt Therapy is Relational.
You are valued in this real relationship in the therapeutic setting. The model is one of recognition of your wisdom and the wisdom of your symptoms.
Gestalt Therapy is Existential
Gestalt therapy includes deep soul searching around issues such as freedom, death, loneliness, authenticity, desire, uncertainty and responsibility. By exploring these themes, you become aware of your values and beliefs that you hold close, while discovering for what purpose you live for.
Awareness, Meditation and Mindfulness.
My own experience has provided me with the evidence of the healing power of mindfulness on mental, emotional and physical health. I provide a place in which we can explore together the aspects of your life you wish to attend to, in which new awareness can emerge providing options and choice that was previously unavailable.
“Psychotherapy is a specific type of enriched environment that promotes social and emotional development, neural integration and the processing of complexity”. Cozolino
Annie Garrety Counselling 