Yohani De Silva

I am available for online, Zoom, WhatsApp and Skype sessions at present. 

Taking the first steps to talk about your problems can be the beginning of making changes and taking control of your life.

I aim to provide a warm, safe, supportive, non-judgemental space, a relationship for healing, finding meaning in life and developing new insights. The counselling relationship is a journey. Like any journey sometimes it can feel scary and sometimes we can feel lost or unsure of where to go next. I will walk with you on this journey and support you in understanding how you make sense of yourself in your world. As an Integrative counsellor I believe that you have the resources within yourself to make positive changes in your life.

Everyone is unique and has within them resources for growth, development and change. I aim to facilitate this process of change by allowing the you to experience from me, the quality of psychological contact and the core conditions of empathy, unconditional positive regard and congruence. Experiencing these core conditions I believe, encourages a focus on feelings, senses, personal meanings and connections so that the individual’s personal resources for change and development can be realised.

Central to my work is my capacity to be open to my own internal world and the way in which it encounters that of their client. It is through our internal world that we understand our outer reality, where the past is alive and dynamically active in the present. I think our inner world is full of meaningful relationships that are consciously known, unconsciously experienced and frequently defended against. In therapy, these current and past relationships are experienced and understood through the prism of transference and counter-transference relationships. As a Counsellor, I make use of both the real person-to-person relationship and the transference relationship to help the client facilitate more authentic and happier ways of being with themselves and others.

I offer short to long-term 1-2-1 Counselling to individuals aged 18 and over. I work with people experiencing a broad range of worries and issues online via Skype, email or WhatsApp in the UK and overseas. 

I bring Eastern and Western outlook in to my work along with Buddhist Psychology when needed so that we have the best of both worlds.  

My first session is about us meeting and having a sense of whether we are a good fit and would be able to work well together. In order to know this for myself, I use this session to take a history of client, so this session is much more structured than any subsequent sessions, where I will be present to what the client brings on the day. I allow ten minutes at the end of the session to see how it was for the client and what they would like to do and make a plan. If they would like to continue, we contract for 4-6 sessions on a weekly basis and then follow this with a review to see where the client is then.