Louise Hooper

I am an experienced counsellor and offer a warm, safe and supportive therapeutic space where we can explore concerns at your own pace. Together we can create some space in your life for you to value yourself and gain some understanding, to facilitate clarity and foster meaningful transformation in your life. Some people contact me wanting to work with a specific issue, whereas others come to counselling wanting space to review where they are and bring some balance back into their life.  I can help you to be curious and reflective, allowing you to make sense of your situation, gain clarity and live with more ease and connection with yourself and others.

As an integrative therapist, I am able to draw on a range of approaches including IFS (Internal Family Systems), Person Centred, Gestalt, Psychodynamic and creativity. I am interested in meditation, mindfulness and compassion and like to work somatically with the whole person, which includes the connection between the mind and the body – as trauma, anxiety and stress can manifest itself physically in the body and nervous system.

I have experience working with a diverse range of difficulties, such as: depression and stress; anxiety and panic attacks; domestic abuse; sexual abuse; bereavement and other life losses; addiction; difficulty adjusting to life changes; feeling overwhelmed and not knowing why; living according to the expectation of others; low self-esteem, negative thoughts and self judgement; self-harm and suicide; past or present relationship and family difficulties; trauma and attachment trauma; chronic pain; chronic illness; getting caught up in overthinking and no being able to switch off your brain.

A period of difficulty (although sometimes painful), can be an opportunity to give yourself the time and space to discover more about you. Patterns and adaptions, that helped you to fit into your families, workplaces and social relationships, may not be serving you in your life now and can become exhausting to your emotional wellbeing, physical wellbeing and mental health. Internal Family Systems therapy offers a powerful, yet gentle and compassionate way to turn towards these patterns.  You may have beliefs about yourself that are limiting and weigh heavy in you.  This isn't about fixing yourself, it's about building a more compassionate relationship with the parts of you that try to protect, manage or make sense of what you've lived through.

I help people through bereavement and we all experience loss in our life, but loss is not only experienced when someone has died.  We can be impacted by divorce or loss of a partnership, loss of health, loss of a sense of who we are or a loss of direction in life, redundancy and retirement, a sense of loss when children leave home and many more.  It may feel like the ground beneath you has opened up and you are separated from life as usual.  It may be a place of uncertainty between what is no longer and what is yet to come.  It is important to take time to grieve these losses.

As part of my training, I have had counselling myself and know how challenging it can be to cross the threshold, put trust in someone else and to allow all of yourself to show up.  It can take courage to be curious.

‘Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are’ – Rachel Naomi Remen

My counselling training was at the University of the West of England (UWE) and I am an accredited member of the Â鶹ԭ´´.  I am also a trained IFS therapist, training at the IFS Institute.