Counselling Services

Our Counselling Approach for Flourishing

Our Four Pillar Counselling Wellness Program ensures there is a 360 degree view of the presenting issue a client, couple or family cares to explore. For example, if a client seeks counselling for their anxiety or depression, we undergo a thorough and accurate assessment of their relaxing - resting - sleeping (Pillar 1), work-life stress integration (Pillar 2), movement-nutrition (Pillar 3), and feeling-thinking patterns or regulation (Pillar 4) that have a direct impact of the presenting health issue so we can ensure counselling is successful and sustainable. In other words, we carefully define and then improve a client's daily well-being lifestyle (sleep, physical activity, nutrition, work - life integration, and mood-thought regulation) that collaborates with our counselling techniques to successfully treat the well-being challenges at hand. Concurrently, remembering that stress is a key trigger to over 75% of our physical and psychological healthcare issues, the Centre for Stress Management has developed a unique and insightful set of stress assessment tools and stress reduction techniques that are understandable, believable and actionable for a client's specific work and personal life issues. As a further example, our counselling model will carefully assess and provide counselling techniques for both the presenting issue such as depression as well the stress associated with the client's depression such as poor sleep, unhealthy eating and or a lack of proper physical activity - exercise. In short, our counselling with each client has two key initial processes: i) assess and improve upon the four pillars of wellness (relax-rest-sleep, work-life integration, movement-nutrition, and emotions-thinking regulation) that enhances each client resilience and motivation to work on the issues at hand, and ii)  discover the triggers and type of stressors our client is experiencing so our client has more physical and psychological energy to deal with the matters at hand. This type of counselling conducted by Dr Mark for our clients increases the opportunities for restoration and growth, sooner instead of later, that enables our clients to experience joy, satisfaction, and relief in their work and personal lives.

Water your dreams with fear, and they will wilt; with doubt, and they will wither;

with hope, and they will grow; with faith, and they will flourish.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Counselling is never a "quick fix" event to acute and or chronic individual, couple, family or workplace issues. Our counselling is a carefully planned out learning process (confusion down, insight up if you will) whereby we ensure the client experiences in counselling: unconditional positive regard, dignity not pathologizing, empathy not pity, active listening, sharing narratives that inspire insightfulness, questions to gain a deeper understanding of the self, growing a trusting and safe relationship with their counsellor, and defining realistic well-being goals to regain and sustain their overall wellness. In short, our clients begin to experience counselling as "learning, not fixing" process that hopefully inspires that person to embrace lifelong learning as a life value. The counselling sessions are usually sixty (60) minutes long, but there may be times the sessions can be extended to ninety (90) minutes per appointment. Our positive psychology counselling is about "externalizing and normalizing" the presenting issues to remove the unfair stigma that one must be "bad or mad" for being in counselling. Thus, our counselling sessions are individually designed to learn and master well-being coping strategies (or what we refer to as building new healthy habits) to life's challenges due to stress and other contributing physical/social/emotional factors based on the client, not the diagnosis. To the point, we work with the whole client, not a single diagnosis label. We use both visual (whiteboard, videos and handouts) and auditory (storytelling, sharing narratives and insights) mediums in our counselling sessions that increases the chances of learning, remembering, developing new life skills and sustaining flourishing well-being habits.

If you desire to learn more on how we provide counselling in your area of concern, please click on the links to the left. We trust you will find the corresponding pages informative, realistic, action-oriented and evidence-based approaches to help you understand the "what" and the "how" with your well-being and overall wellness. You will find our counselling fees very affordable and compassionate as we employ a case by case sliding fee scale for each client to ensure you can have one less stress factor to deal with when coming to counselling. Should you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us privately and confidentially on info@stresshk.com