Email Counselling:
With Email counselling you can take your time with what you want to say and write at a time which feels more therapeutically beneficial for you – either when things are especially difficult for you, or when your mind feels clear and you feel more able to articulate what you want to say. Or perhaps when you have some private time and space during your day or evening.
Painful thoughts and feelings can often get stuck in the mind and the body which can cause stress, anxiety, depression, physical ailments and other difficulties. Some people find expressing themselves through writing easier than talking to someone face-to-face. Expressing yourself through writing can in itself be extremely cathartic and often a sense of relief is experienced on composing an email, and then again on completing and sending it to your counsellor. It can really help to express in this way what is happening in your life - whether this is something happening right now which is causing you a lot of pain and distress, or whether it is something which has happened in the past which you’d like to work through within a safe and trusting space.
The added therapeutic benefits gained through receiving a therapeutic email from your counsellor can be vast - the validation, understanding and insight can often feel quite powerful. Your counsellor will let you know when to expect an email from them. You can open and read your response when you are ready and in your own time.
With Email Counselling your emails and your therapeutic responses can be available for your own reference for as long as you wish. It can sometimes be helpful to re-read your therapeutic response as there may be a lot to take in and process. Some clients gain benefits from re-reading their emails and therapeutic responses some time later (sometimes years) to see how far they have come either in counselling, or in their lives so far.
How Email Counselling works:
- You write and send an email to me in your own time. Within a certain time period I will send you a therapeutic response.
- I will spend at least 1 hour on my therapeutic response - this can be a good indicator as to the length of email you send me - around 800 words works quite well.
- I will use an encrypted email account such as Hushmail to ensure your privacy remains intact. This is downloadable at www.hushmail.com should you wish to choose this form of contact.
- Email counselling allows you to write an email in the privacy of your own home or private space. It can give you time to think about what you want to say.
- It also allows more time to read and process therapeutic responses and you will have a written record of each interaction.