Christian McCabe

Hello.
Are such experiences as depression, feeling so utterly lost and hopeless, what brings you here now, reading these words? Is it the feeling of anxiousness that’s always there, as if uninvited,that feels so overwhelming, almost paralysing? You may be experiencing an almost suffocating sense of panic, as yet another day begs your attention or a relationship that’s lost its meaning, whether with another or with yourself, leaving you feeling isolated, lost and alone.

How do you find help? How do you change such seemingly never ending, negative felt experiences?
I too can relate to such questions. Inside myself, knowing I need to ask for help and that no one else can ask it for me. Finding the courage to take this first step feels so daunting. You may be saying to yourself right now:

“Who can I trust?” 
“Who would hear and understand me?” 
“Who would not judge or criticise me?” 
“Who can I talk to, that would be accepting of me as me?”

I too have churned such questions over and over in my own head, many times. Finding that courage has felt so hard to somehow grab hold of. Yet once I’d taken my first step, as you may be doing right now, the courage to take the next step felt a little easier and the change I’d so longed for, that bit closer.

About counselling, me and how I work.

I am a BACP registered Integrative Humanistic counsellor and group facilitator, qualified to post graduate diploma level and have been practising full time for the last nine years. ‘Integrative’meaning the bringing together of the Psychodynamic, Person-Centred (humanistic) and Cognitive Behavioural principals of psychotherapy to help work towards you becoming a more fully functioning and whole person.
As a counsellor, who identifies as a gay male, I offer to stand alongside you,irrespective of your cultural background or whether you experience your self right now as binary or non-binary or that you’re here reading this because you’re questioning your sense of identity, I’m offering you a safe and non-judgemental space in which either yourself as an individual or in a partnership, can explore the many felt experiences attached to:

• Your relationship with self and what that feels like right now.
• The fear of facing yourself, your identity - “Who am I and where do I belong?”. A curiosity too, that feels suffocated by a deep sense of shame.
• Being in relationship, whether that’s with yourself, another or the world around you.
• The painful feelings of shame, rejection, the sadness around loss (what was or may have been) and the need to have control.
• A continual feeling of anxiousness.
• The many forms of the addictive personality – abusive relationships and co-dependency, drugs and alcohol, sex and pornography, exercise and work.
• Or the awareness that your emotions or feelings, which may have been long locked away, have now reached a point where you may feel as if being ‘eaten from the inside’ and it is now time to express, hear and feel these, find sense and resolve and set yourself free.

In a nutshell, these and other life crippling issues that often leave you feeling you’ve no way out, have been my experience of what brings people into therapy.

Making contact and what to expect.

Sometimes, making sense and finding clarity and resolve can be simpler than perhaps imagined and change can be felt over a shorter period of time. On other occasions, many deeply rooted experiences and subsequent issues may take longer to work through. I am therefore happy to work in both the short term (minimum of 12 sessions) or longer term which can facilitate deeper, more reflective changes.
Such decisions and aims are explored and agreed upon together in our initial assessment process. I feel it is important to say at this point, as this will be our first meeting of each other, the assessment process not only helps me get a sense of you but you, getting a sense of me too - like a two-way street so to speak. What is fundamental to the success of any counselling experience,is the therapeutic relationship that develops between us.

I welcome your enquiry, either by email or mobile and will happily talk through what you feel your needs are, offering you an appointment to meet either face to face at my rooms in Bristol, online via Zoom or telephone, where together we’ll work out a plan of action. This is the assessment process which I mentioned earlier of which I do not charge.
On reflection of your assessment experience, should you feel we could work together, we would discuss a suitable time to meet each week, either during the day or early evenings and begin our work together.