Lee Wong Counselling

Individual Counselling

What is Professional Counselling?

“Professional counselling is a safe and confidential collaboration between qualified counsellors and clients to promote mental health and wellbeing, enhance self-understanding, and resolve identified concerns. Clients are active participants in the counselling process at every stage.”

The Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia

Counselling is a process in which a person engages with a trained professional counsellor to talk about issues and problems they are facing in their lives. These issues can be related to past, present or future and the counselling environment gives a safe, non-judgemental space for people to share their views, be heard, and gain new perspectives and tools to manage their situation and experiences.

How does Counselling Help?

Therapists offer counselling for a broad variety of issues and problems that clients may be facing such as self-identity; mental health concerns; interpersonal relations and conflict; workplace stress; challenging behavioural patterns and stage-of-life transitions and challenges.

Counselling can also help by simply providing a very safe and private space for you to talk about issues and problems that you are having. Due to these problems feeling very private, many individuals may find it difficult to share these concerns with other people as it may feel unsafe or uncomfortable to talk to their usual support network, friends or loved ones.

The Counselling Process

Upon engaging with a counselling service, prior to the first session some details will be provided regarding Confidentiality and Informed Consent; and some personal information will be requested for legal record keeping purposes. More information on the security and uses of this information can be found on our Privacy and Confidentiality page.

Telephone and video individual counselling sessions usually last up to 50 minutes, with 10 minutes allocated to relevant administrative duties such as note taking and invoice processing. This breakdown is often regarded as the “counselling hour”.

In initial sessions, the counselling process places a large emphasis on developing a comprehensive overview of primary concerns the client wants to explore. From there, the client and counsellor work together to identify the direction and goals that proceeding counselling sessions will focus on.

Counselling is often client-centred, whereby the goal is for the client to make the decision on the best course of action with the support of their therapist. The counsellor can provide tools, techniques, suggestions and homework.

Finding a Counsellor

It is expected of counsellors to exemplify 3 primary traits during counselling, to be: caring; genuine and empathic. You can also ask if the counsellor is registered through one of the peak professional bodies in Australia, and if they adhere to a Professional Code of Ethics.

Counsellors often specialise in different areas. We encourage you to ask counsellors questions that help you identify whether they will be an appropriate fit for your need. You may like to ask the following:

• Do they have a particular area of expertise
• What each session will cost
• The number of sessions likely to be needed to achieve your counselling goals

If interested, you can view my areas of expertise, my qualifications and counsellor registration details, the code of ethics I adhere to, and my session fees. If you have any queries or concerns, I encourage you to get in contact with me through my contact form.