What is Intuitive Counselling?

Intuitive counselling works with your implicit thoughts and feelings. It’s based on the idea that you have the answers…

You Already Have The Answers

Intuitive counselling is the name I’ve chosen for my personal style of therapy, which is similar to cognitive behavioural therapy, narrative therapy, and exposure therapy.

According to the dictionary, the word intuitive has two meanings. One is “using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive” and the other, when referring to a task or describing software, “easy to use and understand”.

Intuitive counselling works with your implicit thoughts and feelings. It’s based on the idea that you have the answers to your questions within you. While there are many layers to our thoughts and feelings, the truth is at the centre of our own heart, our own mind. Everything we need to know, to have peace of mind, is already present within us, we only need to access it.

I’ve met many people who have an excellent intellectual understanding of why they are the way they are, with perfectly logical and reasonable explanations as to what has shaped the person that they are today, and in spite of this understanding, they find themselves thinking, feeling and reacting in the same ways as before. This only goes to show we can’t understand ourselves or others through logic and reason alone. We need to see and feel our thoughts and emotions as they arise in the present, and are reflected in the body. It’s easy to deny in thought, or word, our true thoughts, feelings, fears and desires, but if we look carefully, sensations in our body reveal when we’re concealing negativity and when we’re in denial. When you bring awareness to your body, it tells you how you really feel without need for explanation, it is instinctive.

This is what I do in meditation and what has led me to conceive of counselling as an organic process. It’s natural for us to question and challenge the logic of our thinking. It’s natural to tell ourselves stories, to revise those stories, and to confront our fears. By becoming familiar with cognitive distortions, we’re more likely to recognise them, and in becoming familiar with the process of critical thinking we naturally question our thoughts and beliefs. When logic and reason are combined with mindfulness practices that bring us to into the body and allow us to feel our feelings we develop an intimate wisdom about how our thoughts and beliefs make us feel. This wisdom isn’t based on theory but on your own direct experience, and this is intuition. The aim of counselling is to help you develop your own wisdom, your own intution.

Intuitive counselling is based on present moment observation and acknowledges that every person is unique and constantly changing, and therefore no single approach will work for everyone, or every challenge. I do not “believe in” psychological theories as an ultimately true or accurate representation of human behaviour. I think of a good psychological theory as describing one of many natural mental processes and rather than approach others with a single philosophy to “make sense of them”, I allow all of what I’ve learned and practiced to arise naturally within the therapeutic conversation.

You Are Not a Diagnosis

I will never label you and generally consider psychiatric labels to be problematic. When we label ourselves as “being depressed”, as “being bipolar” or as “having borderline personality disorder”, we’re no longer describing an experience we’re having, that we can observe, but saying that is what we are. We cannot change what we are no more than a rose can be anything other than a rose, no matter what you choose to call it, but you are not your thoughts and feelings, they come and go, whereas you do not. The word intuition refers to the direct experience of ones thoughts and feelings as something you’re aware of, as opposed to something that you are. Your thoughts and feelings then do not define who or what you are and that is one of many insights counselling and meditation are designed to help us realise.

In intuitive counselling, the person isn’t considered the problem. In fact, the situation they find themselves in isn’t even considered the “problem”. Rather, we understand our negative thoughts and feelings to be the real “problem”, for it is those feelings we’re trying to avoid, but which we actually need to explore.

In intuitive counselling, as in meditation, we don’t want to spend too much time looking at external solutions to our problems. We can’t control what other people think, say, feel or do, and we can’t predict or control most things that are going to happen to or around us. The first step in counselling, as in meditation, is to ask ourselves if a change in perspective or understanding can solve the problem of our negative feelings. When we have a better understanding of why we think and feel the way we do, we can make informed decisions about our life that are grounded in the values we cherish, and which arise from a positive motivation, such as love, as opposed to a negative motivation such as fear.