Claire Dyson

Claire is a BACP-accredited Integrative Relational Counsellor offering therapy for individuals and couples in Weybridge. Drawing on a range of therapeutic models Claire tailors her approach to you rather than you having to contort yourself to fit into a standard process.

Claire believes that the client-therapist relationship is central to successful therapy so provides a calm, reflective space in which to pause, explore the root causes of your difficulties then consider what changes you may want to make or find a way to be happy despite, as Mo Gawdat puts it, having something in your Life you’d rather wasn’t there.

Claire is experienced and trained to work with you upon:

• Recalibrating your anxiety (or anger or stress or overwhelm or burnout, whatever the emotion is that disrupts living a contented Life) so you get your fight / flight or freeze / flop / fawn “survival modes” out of the driving seat of your Life and become more adept at managing the emotional roller coaster of Life by building in some pauses, objectivity and, on occasion, acceptance so things don’t get to you as much.

• Enabling couples to break free from repetitive “Groundhog Day” arguments that escalate into conflict and undermine an otherwise good relationship. Claire supports couples in first learning to deescalate things then reconnect, recognise strengths in the relationship, identify destructive cycles, and work towards healthier, more constructive patterns of connection and communication. It is a bit of a cross between counselling and coaching in that, as you would expect, emotional responses are explored and also Claire will offer plenty of practical tools to strengthen connection and communication. If one or both partners in a couple have been to boarding school, Claire may be particularly useful (see Boarding School section below).

• Laying peacefully to rest old memories that are still bouncing around in the present causing trouble.  Those “blood runs cold” / “travelling back in time”, moments when something about a current situation or conversation transports you back to an awful event or experience in the past. The memory starts to replay in your mind’s eye all over again and suddenly you are in one of the “survival modes” mentioned above rather than handling things as they are actually happening. This could be memories from childhood or more recent traumatic events e.g. a car crash and you panic at the mere thought of driving again, a betrayal by someone close to you or being fired / made redundant, without warning.  Claire will use EMDR, a method for consigning such “flashback” type memories to history by rapidly zeroing in on the “target” memory and kick-starting your brain’s own natural process of settling it in long term memory, a process interrupted at the time because the event was so overwhelmingly distressing or hurtful.

• Emotional eating and binge eating: if you feel trapped in patterns of compulsive or addictive eating (or want to protect your GLP-1 assisted weight loss once you come off medication), Claire has specialist  training to (by developing your self-awareness) get to the underlying causes of how you learned to turn to food for comfort in the first place then, based on what you discover, work on improving self-esteem, body-esteem and the circles of support around you to create healthier, more sustainable habits for managing your emotional life rather than eating your feelings being the “go to” strategy.

• The complicated experience of having gone to Boarding School: Whilst boarding school may have been the making of you in many respects (and Claire doesn’t deny, seek to change or undermine that) Claire has specialist training to work with you to stand down some of the “helpful at the time as I had to grow up fast yet a damn nuisance now” behaviour causing ructions between you and loved ones. Qualities you prize such as self-reliance, emotional detachment, objectivity and independence, are admirable, vital even, in certain situations yet can also pull against forming a deep, trusting emotional connection with your partner, or parental bonds with each of your children, because you switch into “survival mode” at the first sign of heightened emotion or conflict.

Claire charges £80 per session for adults and £100 per session for couples.

Please contact Claire directly to discuss your situation.