Elena Steers

Counselling is so much more than like ‘having a chat with a friend, that you pay for’, as I heard someone describe it. Counselling can hold you in a crisis and help you to heal, but it has a lot more to offer than crisis management.

Through my private practice, Exeter Counselling and Wellbeing Services, I can offer you a place to share your feelings, to explore what’s causing you pain and distress, and to find ways to change or manage those things that are weighing you down or holding you back.

I am an Integrative Counsellor and this means that I have trained in a carefully programmed combination of approaches: this enables me to offer you a very tailored experience of therapy. My main focus for therapy, is to enable you to find a way through whatever is troubling you, so that life is more manageable, the future more hopeful and maybe even your dreams become possible!

The approaches I use are from different areas of therapy; I often explore past experiences drawing on Attachment Theory and Emotional Regulation Theory, at the same time as working on what’s happening for you in the moment – sometimes referred to as the ‘Here and Now’ approach. Alongside this I may use some CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) techniques to help you reframe your thinking if this is causing you some issues. Creativity is very useful in therapy as it helps us to imagine a different way of being or to explore a difficult area – sometimes words are just too hard, and finding another way of expressing keeps the process feeling within your control.

The beauty of integrating techniques is that what we do is tailored to you, the way you work and what you need. But, most importantly, at the heart of what I do is to provide a non-judgemental way of being with you that can help us to build a trusting relationship.

My practice is based in bright, modern, fully accessible rooms in Exeter, and I provide both face to face and online sessions.

I will have a telephone conversation with you before we start sessions, to get an idea of what you are looking for from therapy. 

There is a little paperwork at the first session, but I aim to keep this as simple as possible, so that I can spend some time listening to you and understanding what has brought you to therapy. Sometimes it's not always easy to say in the first session, what you want from counselling, and that's ok. It may take a couple of sessions for you to settle into the work and begin to see the way ahead.