Esther Walker

I work weekdays (excluding Fridays) and am available evenings on Mondays and Wednesdays.

I'm a Gestalt counsellor based near Haymarket in Edinburgh.  I offer online and face-to-face sessions in a way that's both flexible and collaborative.  

My aim is to help you resolve distress by supporting your vitality (aliveness in body/mind) and personal resource (knoweldge, understanding, skills).

I work with three complementary approaches: 

Gestalt Counselling  resolves patterns of experience (thought, belief, feeling, behaviour, movement) that echo the past and cause problems in the present.

Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) releases somatic memories (related to trauma and attachment disruption) which your body remembers but which are outside your conscious awareness.

Systemic (or Family) Constellations (SC)  uncovers hidden loyalties and connections to your family of origin that shape your experience of the world (both positively and negatively). 

Gestalt counselling

Gestalt offers a practical approach to exploring and resolving difficult feelings and situations. We'll attend to how you make sense of the world, bringing into awareness what is currently hidden from sight/hearing/touch...by learning through  experimentation and practice. 

Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR)

Developed by Frank Corrigan, a Scottish Psychiatrist and trauma specialist, DBR is an effective treatment for clients with anxiety, depression and other symptoms of trauma https://deepbrainreorienting.com/

DBR attends to deeply held, embodied experience of trauma (including attachment shock).  These somatic patterns are out of our conscious awareness yet fundamentally shape how we think, feel and behave.  

The process resolves blocks to energy flow in the nervous system at a deep brain level that talking therapies struggle to reach. 

Systemic (or Family) Constellations (SC)

While DBR attends to the internal systems of the body (in particular the nervous system) Systemic Constellations (SC) attends to the external system/s our nervous system adapts to.

We're born into a family (whatever form that takes) that has survived traumatic events and experiences over generations (eg. war, death, abandonment, poverty) by hardening, bending, twisting to protect against the pain that may destroy it.  We experience those contortions through the hands, eyes, voice, expressions of our carers.  In this way we learn at an embodied, unconscious level our family's rule book for survival: e.g. "don't cry" "put others' needs before your own" "be the best".

Of course most of what's in the rule book is neither acknowledged nor made explicit...yet we know it by heart...at a cellular level.  In order to bring movement to current problems we need a way of including this wider system, and identifying the implicit rules that bind us.  SC does that by creating a moment - a constellation - using everyday objects, to help understand what blocks energy flow and what can restore movement.

Our first meeting (free) will be either on the phone or in person, lasting 30-40 minutes where we can explore what you're looking for and see if we're a good fit.