Will's Counselling Theories
Counselling Theories Designed to Work For You
My counselling theories are hard working and effective.
Times have changed in the world of counselling. Until recently, people would commit to therapy for years. That isn’t the case in today’s world. People live busy lives and most of us have limited financial resources. Therapy can be expensive, especially over a long period of time. You want your counsellor to get right down to business for you. That’s why I use counselling theories that are practical and direct.
Effective counselling should be available to everyone.
I want my services to be accessible to you, so I choose theories that allow us to do efficient in-depth work. My theories help you see big picture fast. They make things tangible and easier to understand. From there, you can start making choices for change right away – from the time of our first session. Read on to learn how the counselling theories that inspire me can help you.
Response-Based Practice
Response-Based Practice is the backbone of my therapeutic work.
This groundbreaking theory brings the counselling field ahead by leaps and bounds through its attention to how people actually respond to challenges and adversity. Historically, counsellors and psychologists assumed that when bad stuff happens to people, they’re negatively effected, period. This implies that you are passively acted upon and “damaged” by negative experiences. It doesn’t acknowledge the fact that you’re an active social agent. It then becomes the therapist’s job “fix” you.
Bringing your accounts of resistance to the forefront.
When bad stuff happens, everybody does something – even if that means doing as little as possible. In times of difficulty, crisis, or trauma, you do what you know how in order to make it through. These are stories that many psychological theories don’t make room for. They’re also vital for processing these experiences so that you can feel more at ease. Response-Based Practice has diverse applications, from violence and trauma, to relationship challenges, to struggles with work, and beyond.
Read more about Response-Based Practice
Listen to this CBC Radio interview about Response-Based Practice with Dr. Allan Wade and Dr. Cathy Richardson
Solution-Focused Therapy
With Solution-Focused Therapy, the name says it all.
This counselling theory is all about finding solutions to the challenges you bring in to therapy. It’s often hard to think outside the scope of our problems. It can start to feel like they’re always working overtime, and you never get a break from them. But when things are bad, there’s always exceptions. Solution-Focused Therapy helps us to zero in on those exceptions and take an up-close look at how they got to be there in the first place.
It’s all about putting difference to work for you.
If things are better sometimes, and worse at other times, what’s different between those two pictures? Solution-Focused Therapy helps us to identify what you’re doing differently in either case. This helps you see the good work you’re already doing, and opens up the possibility of doing even more of it. This counselling theory also work well with experiments or homework that are designed to help you find creative solutions to the difficulties you face.
Narrative Therapy
You are a full-time meaning-making machine.
As human beings, we’re always trying to make sense of things. We do this through the creation of stories, or narratives. Most of the time, in order for things to make sense, they need to fit together coherently. To meet this end, we focus more on the details of any given story or experience that fit with the bigger narrative about our lives. This means we also focus less on the details that don’t fit so well. So if you have a narrative that says “I’m a good student”, and you get 70% on a test, you’ll probably focus more on the 70% you got right, and less on the 30% you didn’t.
Some narratives don’t serve us all that well.
A lot of problem narratives are restrictive and discouraging. When people join me for counselling, they often have some stories or ideas that don’t fit within the kind of life they want to be living. Narrative Therapy allows us to explore and unpack how you came to form the stories that you did, while also pointing out exceptions along the way. Through these exceptions to the problem story, we can find and create preferable alternatives that fit better with the kind of life you want to be living.