Nicola Wills - Counselling & Psychotherapy
Therapy Tailored To Your Needs
How many sessions will I need?
I work in an open ended way with clients. How many sessions you need will be dictated by how helpful you feel the sessions are. Often, clients know when it feels like the right time to end is, and we can discuss this in the first initial sessions together.
What I can generally recommend is, where possible, we start with 3 sessions of regular weekly appointments to establish our working relationship, goals and the right approach for you. After which we can work together weekly, fortnightly or ad-hoc depending on your circumstances and needs.
From my experience supporting individuals, I believe there is a wide variation in:
Levels of support people need
How circumstances may effect them
How people communicate and process
How they build working and trusting relationships.
What’s important to me is that you feel comfortable, safe and supported in our sessions and that there is space for us to meet wherever feels helpful in that moment, however many sessions that takes.
Individual therapy looks different for every person because it is tailored to you. If you are looking for a space that can adapt with your needs, I may be able to support you.
I trained and practice as an Integrative Counsellor and Psychotherapist. I specifically chose this way of working because i believe it offers the best possible support to my clients, blending and combining lots of different ways of approaching an issue so that you get the best support possible.
Whether you’re new to Counselling or have tried it but felt it wasn’t helpful, an integrative model may able to support you because its:
Holistic - it aims to consider the whole person, including their relationships and support structures
Flexible and adaptable to individual needs, not one size fits all
Evidence-based - both using proven techniques and what is proven to work for you individually. If it’s evident something isn’t working for you we can shift to another technique that might fit better.
I also work with couples, and can support you to understand your own patterns of relating and improve intimacy and connection in your relationships.
What will sessions look like?
The short answer is: Your needs will inform what our future sessions look like, based on our initial consultation and first few sessions together.
In our introductory call, we will discuss what you would like to be different and explore some of the approaches I can utilise to support you to meet your goals. Below is an explanation of some of the different approaches I regularly use to support clients.
After this, our first 2/3 sessions will help me learn a bit more about you and what you would like to achieve as a first step. We will work to make that as specific and achievable as possible. From then we will periodically measure if you feel the sessions are supporting you in your goals with regular reviews.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy
My approach is DBT-informed. Rather than a more structured, intensive approach in traditional and fully-comprehensive DBT, I aim to blend helpful elements from skills practice and behaviour analysis to support you. A DBT-informed approach aims to help you:
Understand how your “difficult” feelings work
Build awareness of current emotions
Learn really practical skills to manage these feelings in the moment, and long term
Develop a dialectical approach to life, helping you accept reality and more towards your goals effectively.
This is great for supporting with understanding emotions, emotional overwhelm, managing problematic behaviour or compulsions, anxiety/depression. I also have found it is a good balance of structure and autonomy, which is perfect for neurodivergent clients supporting them to unmask and feel that they have tools to move towards their life goals.
Key focus areas:
Mindfulness is a key component of DBT, supporting us to understand reality so we can make confident choices
‘Dialectical’ means trying to understand how two things that seem opposite could both be true
DBT looks at biological (genetic, physical), psychological (thoughts, emotions) and social (environmental, cultural) factors that limit a person’s ability to accept and change their current situation and provides skills or different perspectives to move towards established goals
There is no right and wrong in DBT, only effective and ineffective behaviours.
Things to consider:
The approach in DBT relies on the practitioner and client to work together to find strategies that work for the individual. It involves a more scientific and experiential approach. Because of this, there is usually homework set and the effectiveness of the therapy depends greatly on the client having space and time to practice skills in their everyday lives outside of sessions, which some other styles of therapy do not utilise.
Therapy Approaches
Psychodynamic Approach
A psychodynamic approach underpins all my work with my clients. From here, we can understand how unconscious processes and foundational experiences impact the present. You are encouraged to talk freely and openly about your experiences and relationships. This can help you understand what you’re feeling now, why you behave in a certain way and how this affects your relationships.
Key focus areas:
Understanding how early relationships and experiences still echo within our present and inform our emotional state and decision-making
Building an understanding of how different parts of ourselves collide and cause tensions
Uncovering, understanding and resolving internal conflicts
Understanding defence mechanisms, to safely face reality.
Acknowledging the meaning and impact of past experiences can help manage current feelings, foster self-awareness and personal growth, and develop long-term resilience. This style of Counselling seeks to understand why we are the way we are, to bring more unconscious to the forefront to make clearer choices in life.
Relational Approach
This approach is interwoven into every element of my practice. It seeks to use the relationship between counsellor and client as a tool to understand your experience of connection, vulnerability an d safety with another person. This experiential approach can be significant in healing relational traumas and addressing attachment styles.
Things to consider:
Studies show repeatedly that they key component to successful therapy is the relationship between counsellor and client. This is why this approach can sometimes feel unstructured and slow - because it takes time to get to know and understand each other and for the relationship to feel safe enough to be more present within it, particularly if you struggle with anxiety, feeling safe around others or there is trauma present.
Because of this, I seek to add some structure into our sessions by regularly reviewing and working in a trauma-informed way to monitor feelings of safety in the relationship and process.
Trauma-Informed practice
Awareness of trauma is a foundational part of my practice and an area I continue to focus on in my professional development to be sure my awareness is up to date. I continue to work through a relational lens to understand the psychological elements of what happened to you and to address somatic elements of safety, working with the felt sense in the body to slowly and gently become aware that the threat is over and we are safe here.
What you are experiencing could be from a life-threatening singular event or a slow but significant series of events, the trauma response doesn’t distinguish. The important part is the meaning of the event and how you feel now its past. Whatever has caused the impact, we will work together to understand its impact on you.
Things to consider:
Working with trauma is often slower than people think. Slowing down, trust and feeling safe takes time
I work in a normalising and holistic way. I believe that our bodies response to trauma isn’t ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’, the same way that our bodies swell around a broken bone. It is a form of protection
You don’t have to remember the event in perfect detail. We will work with whatever is left with you from what has happened to you
In the beginning, there is an element of us working together to find your unique way of feeling grounded and in control before we begin exploring.
If the threat has passed, but you are left with confused feelings as you make sense of what happened to you, we can work in a safe way to address this so that you don’t just know the threat has passed but you can feel it too.
Get In Touch
I offer every new client a free consultation call to explore your needs to ensure I am the right practitioner for you. There is no obligation to book regular therapy sessions after that call.
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"We are wounded in relationships, and we heal through relationships.”
- Dr. Gabor Maté