Counselling is a talking therapy that gives you a safe space to speak about anything in your life that might be affecting your wellbeing. Thoughts, feelings and behaviours can be explored together, in a confidential way, to help you find more balance in your life, your experiences and your relationships.
The counselling service at Birmingham LGBT is specifically for LGBT people from the local community. We provide affirmative counselling, which means we will help you to explore who you are from your perspective and without an agenda of our own. You are the expert in yourself, and our role is to help you understand yourself more clearly and confidently.
Our counsellors are all qualified. They are also registered with a professional counselling body, such as the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), and they adhere to professional codes of ethics. All receive regular supervision and complete regular, further training.
At Birmingham LGBT we offer two different counselling routes:
You are free to choose whichever service would be best for you.
There is no charge for our counselling services.
Sessions take place in a calm and safe environment, either in person at Birmingham LGBT, or online or by telephone. Sessions last for up to 50 minutes and they are usually at the same time each time, on a weekly or fortnightly basis.
We offer up to 12 sessions for the LGBT Counselling service and up to 16 sessions for the Trans Inclusion Counselling service. The first session will involve an assessment of your circumstances and a review is usually completed half way through your sessions.
It is important that clients decide what to talk about in sessions and set the agenda. Your therapist will help you to reflect on your experiences, thoughts and feelings to support you to identify ways of managing and changing the things that are important to you.
To make accessing our counselling services as easy as possible we offer appointments six days per week, including some evenings and Saturdays too. Your preferred day and method of counselling will be accommodated wherever possible, although the more flexibility you have the sooner you are likely to be seen.
The waiting time for sessions to be offered is usually about six months after receipt of your referral form.
Clients may have a preference over the gender of the counsellor they see. Wherever possible we will try to accommodate this, but all our counsellors are widely experienced and knowledgeable. As our counsellors are trained as integrative practitioners, we can also offer a variety of different therapeutic approaches in order to meet the varying needs of different clients.
Sometimes, it becomes apparent that clients might benefit from using other services at Birmingham LGBT, or from being referred on to other organisations to meet some of their needs. We can offer support to clients in accessing other services, as required.
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