Counselling

What you need to know...

Any unpaid carer aged 16 and over can access our service
You can self-refer by completing the following form and emailing: [email protected] or you can call the centre on 01382 200422 for further information or guidance.
Another professional or family member can make the referral on your behalf.
Once we receive your referral, we will add you to our waiting list and contact you to ask about your availability and preference for counselling (face to face, online, or telephone counselling)
Once a counsellor is available that matches your availability, we will contact you to complete an initial assessment – this will help us to identify what brought you to counselling and what you might like to achieve, and your preferred ways of working and learning. We will support you to identify if counselling is the right fit for you. You will then be allocated to a counsellor and can begin your sessions.
We offer up to 12 sessions in addition to the initial assessment and these last for a maximum of 50 minutes.
Face-to-face counselling will be carried out at the carers centre.
We are a free service, but you can support the running of our service by making a donation this does not impact your sessions.
All counsellors used by the service are either fully trained to Diploma level, or current Diploma students. Counsellors also receive regular supervision sessions and abide by the BACP (British Association of Counselling & Psychotherapy) Code of Ethics.
Counselling sessions are completely confidential and a safe space – the only exception to this is where we believe there is risk or harm to you or someone else.
As there are only a limited number of counsellors and times available, there is a waiting list, but we do our best to keep you informed and try to keep waiting times down.

Make a Referral

To make a referral to our services complete our online referral form by clicking the button below:

You are the expert on you...

The counselling process

Therapy is an opportunity to work on things in your life, and to find more satisfying and rewarding ways of living.

Research shows that therapy can be very helpful for many people and that most clients leave counselling or psychotherapy feeling much better than when they started. However, we also know that the more clients know about therapy before they start, and the more they put into it, the more they are likely to get out of it.

For this reason, we have provided information below to tell you about the therapy we offer, and how you can make it as helpful as possible for you.

How we can help

We like to think of ourselves as providing you with a counselling ‘menu’, so that you can decide, with our support, what you would most like to work on. Some of the issues that clients often choose to focus on are:

Talking through an issue to make sense of what has happened, and to put things in perspective
Making sense of a specific problematic event that sticks in your mind; problem-solving, planning, and decision-making
Changing behaviour
Negotiating a life transition or developmental crisis
Dealing with difficult feelings and emotions
Finding, analysing, and acting on information
Undoing self-criticism and enhancing self-care
Dealing with difficult or painful relationships.

With help and guidance, I feel I can see things with a completely different light and from a better perspective. This has not only helped me emotionally, but also caring for my mum

Often, clients find it most helpful to work on these issues on a step-by-step basis. One of the ways that counselling may help is that your counsellor can work with you to disentangle the various strands of the problem and help you to decide what needs to be dealt with first.

We offer a flexible and personalised approach.

The counselling that we offer is based on the belief that people who come for counselling are experts on their own lives (even if they don’t feel they are), and have lots of potentially good ideas about how to deal with their problems. One of the main roles of a counsellor, as we see it, is to help the person to make the best use of their experience and understanding.

This means that our integrative and pluralistic approach to counselling is to try to be as flexible as possible in responding to your needs.

Thank you so much for the counselling sessions. You have really helped me and my family. I will take away the message that “I am not my thoughts”

What we find (this is backed up by research) is that different people are helped in different ways. For instance, what some people find most helpful in their therapy is to express their feelings. Other people find it more helpful to take a rational approach to their problems and use the therapy to ‘think things through’.

Who to call in a crisis

We would advise the following services if you find yourself in a crisis:

NHS 24 Tel: 111
Samaritans National Tel: 116123
Dundee number: 01382 832555
Perth number: 01738 626666
Breathing Space Tel: 0800 838587
For other crisis contacts click here