Counselling
A qualified and experienced counsellor, I offer counselling to adults regardless of age, sex, sexual orientation, race and history.
For those unfamiliar with counselling, starting out can feel unusual. We’re not used to the attentiveness, and the sometimes uncomfortable experience of sharing our stories, thoughts and feelings with thoughtful reflections delivered in return by someone who cares. And it may take some time to feel sufficiently comfortable about bringing to consciousness what we’ve been holding onto for so long, perhaps without realising it.
From the start of the first session, you will have a chance to speak about whatever feels right for you. We go at your pace. I will listen and communicate my understanding of your situation, sometimes offering what I sense to be in the unconscious communication as well as acknowledging the conscious. The mutuality of the counselling relationship means we are both stakeholders in the process.
My approach is integrative, making meanings from a number of modalities. Longer term work is most likely to take a more psychodynamic approach, where we explore unconscious processes that affect us and our defences against uncomfortable or even terrifying feelings. We consider how early relationships reveal themselves in the way we relate to each other. We make the unconscious, conscious.
If that is too much theory, be assured that you will experience an empathic listener, gently encouraging you to put words to your thoughts and feelings in the security of a confidential, boundaried, therapeutic relationship.
Within counselling I have particular interests in relationships in all their expressions; personal and interpersonal issues around age, sex and gender; the anxiety and stress of living away from home or after breakups; workplace stress; and helping people towards confidence and empowerment.
Contact Adrian on counsellor@adriantupper.co.uk or visit Adrian’s website https://adriantupper.co.uk/ .
Supervision
As a counsellor myself, practising using psychodynamic and integrative approaches, I bring first hand knowledge of the counsellor-client relationship, which helps supervisees understand what might be going on between their clients and themselves. The psychodynamic approach especially values what might be brought unconsciously into the supervisory relationship from the client relationship and how this manifests in emotions and bodily sensations, leading to some insight into what these might be telling us.
My supervision style applies to all counselling approaches. I believe the supervisee is the greatest resource. And the supervisor’s job is not so much to instruct the supervisee, but to help the supervisee understand what’s happening in the room and how that might inform the work with their client.
I offer supervision to counsellors, coaches, mentors, mediators and others whose work brings them into direct engagement with clients or service users. My approach is set out by Hawkins and Shohet (2004) “Supervision in the Helping Professions”. Also known as the “Seven Eyed Model”, it focuses not only on the supervisee-client relationship but also on the supervisor-supervisee relationship as a parallel process for that work. We look at interventions the supervisee might have made in their work, interpersonal dynamics and what characterises a working relationship, the emotional content of the work and how that affects the supervisee, and what might be around outside of the working relationship that is nevertheless present in the practice.
I trained with CSTD London in all four supervision modules: “Core”, “Therapeutic”, “Group” and “Advanced”, which I completed in 2019. And I have the Certificate in Supervision from CSTD.
Contact Adrian regardng supervision on supervisor@adriantupper.co.uk or visit Adrian’s website https://adriantupper.co.uk/ .