Spini Watts

I am a qualified integrative counsellor and a registered member of the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists (BACP) and I practice within the BACP’s Ethical Framework.

As an integrative counsellor, I can draw from various theoretical approaches to individually tailor how we work effectively for your specific personal needs.

This way, the whole of my attention is on you as a person and what your needs may be at that moment.

My core modality is person-centred which puts you at the centre of your journey.

Listen and understand your experiences

My approach is to listen and understand your experiences.

I offer a free consultation where we can discuss your goals, ask me questions and I will explain how we could work together.

I often use Cognitive Behavioural Therapy tools in my practice.

In your first session, we’ll explore what brought you to therapy and then decide the most appropriate ways to help you make progress.

With CBT, we’ll look at how your thoughts affect your emotions and experience.

Acquire new coping skills

I don’t claim to have the answers, but I can help you acquire new coping skills and overcome obstacles in your path.

I consider a good working relationship vital in our work together, for a successful outcome to be achieved.

Counselling can have a powerful impact in helping you to make sense of your feelings and work through them in a nurturing space.

Bereavement

Bereavement or situations of loss can be hard to deal with.

They can lead to feelings of helplessness, anxiety and depression.

Feelings of loneliness where you might feel unseen, unheard, unvalued and uncared for.

Pain and Confusion

Having gone through losses myself, I understand the pain and confusion that comes with grief.

My journey might be different from yours but this has helped me realise the kind of environment that is needed for people to feel truly heard, and seen and be compassionately curious about who they are.

Feeling Overwhelmed

Given how complex and overwhelming things can feel, it can be difficult to talk to our family and friends about our problems; it is often easier to speak to someone who is not emotionally involved in our lives.

Nothing is too big or too small to be talked about.

I provide a non-judgemental space where you can be truly yourself and feel safe to open up and explore your worries and experiences together.

Work together

There are no coping strategies that can take the pain away, but, we can work together to take steps to soothe your pain, find meaning through your loss and make your grieving process easier to move through

Help with intense emotions

No one can understand your grief but yourself. Grief counselling can help you to address the intense emotions to help you move on with your healing process.

This can lead to gaining a greater understanding of your feelings and emotions, learning new ways of approaching situations and using alternative strategies to help you cope better.

Trauma

My approach is to listen and understand your experiences.

Feeling your feelings, and accepting them, is key to healing from trauma.

Trauma can affect other aspects of your life like relationships and many more. Our past life experiences can have a lasting effect on our current situations, leaving us sometimes feeling hopeless about the future.

Moving forward

We have so much unprocessed pain in our system, collective wounds we are carrying that contribute to dysfunctional behaviours.

The limiting beliefs contribute to believers of unworthiness, I am not good enough, and a lot of shame and fear, which manifest from our childhood, and through trauma therapy, we can explore that.

Counselling can provide space for people to talk about their feelings, fears and difficulties without having to worry about the impact on their friends and family. This gives people the opportunity to work out a meaningful way to move forward.

The process of healing

In today’s world, we are surrounded by distractions: boxsets, food, alcohol, the list goes on.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with engaging with any of these things.

However, for many of us, they can become tools to help us cope with day-to-day stresses, to obscure from us what we may be feeling within.

These feelings can often be signposts towards unconscious or subconscious memories and experiences from our early years, ‘wounds’ which need our conscious attention, for us to be happy and thrive.

Through my practice, I can assist you in identifying the roots of these feelings and thus begin the process of healing.

Anger

Anger is a natural response often used as a protective mechanism to shield ourselves from intensity or to hide from painful emotions.

It is a necessary emotional feedback from our system, and it surfaces due to feelings of helpfulness, when we feel powerless or when our boundaries have been crossed.

It happens at the unconscious level because it’s been suppressed.

Our upbringing and society have an influence on our anger suppression.

This can be because we were not taught how to express ourselves from our formative years, we were hushed and told to do as we were told, or it could be that we suppressed our emotions with fear of losing relationships, being abandoned and many more reasons.

Together we can work on how to integrate your emotions rather than get rid of them. Learn how to live with it and learn how to connect with those feelings when they arise so that you can maintain them in a functional way.

I often use Cognitive Behavioural Therapy tools in my practice.

With CBT, we will look at how your thoughts affect your emotions and experience.