+61 (0) 426 844 127
Begin Your Journey to Freedom.
Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is more painful as staying stuck where you don't belong.
N. R. Narayana Murphy
Meet Pamela
I am a motivated, dynamic trauma-informed counsellor with a particular interest in psyche-education, evidence-based research, professional development and clinical supervision. I am currently engaged in private practice.
My own life experiences have enabled me the opportunities to hone my skills and knowledge through working with people, as well as through continuous professional development, to meet the needs of my Clients.
My interests in therapeutic work involve family work, relationships, abuse (sexual, physical, emotional and psychological), addictions, anxiety, stress, depression, grief, bereavement and loss, trauma and crisis work, and post-traumatic stress.
Services
I offer Individual Therapy, Family Therapy, Couples Therapy, and Child & Adolescent Therapy for any of the following:
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Anxiety
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Stress
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Depression
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Grief & Loss
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Anger Management
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Self-Esteem / Self-Worth
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Assertive Communications
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Self-Harm / Suicide
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Self-Care & Resilience
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Boundaries
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Cancer
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Prenatal and Postnatal Depression
Clinical Supervision - I am a registered member of the Australian Counsellors Association College of Supervisors
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Bullying
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Guilt / Shame
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Trauma
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Abuse
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Grounding Techniques
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Progressive Muscle Relaxation
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Relaxed Breathing
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Eating Disorders
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Forgiveness
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Addictions
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Relationships & Family Issues
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PTSD
Therapeutic Approaches
I utilise a collaboration of integrated therapeutic styles within my work, which includes the following models of therapy:
Client-Centred Therapy
Using Client-Centred Therapy allows the client to be able to develop a greater understanding of themself in an environment where the client learns how to develop the necessary skills to resolve their problems, without direct intervention by the therapist. It emphasises the human-centred perspective as well as ensuring the therapeutic relationship, with the client, promotes self-esteem, authenticity and actualisation in the client's life. It is an effective therapy for clients with depression, anxiety & stress, and low self-esteem; as it enables, and encourages, the client to utilise their own strengths (Rogers, 2015).
Existential Psychotherapy allows the client to see life as a philosophy with four identified human concerns of life/death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness while supporting the client to find their inner strengths, and develop strategies to face life's dilemmas.
It is effective for clients with depression, anxiety, substance abuse, addiction, and posttraumatic stress (Yalom, 1980).
Gestalt Psychotherapy
A German word, meaning wholeness, or "to make whole" allows the client to focus on the here and now of their thoughts, feelings and situation. It is guided by four theoretical pillars that make up Gestalt methodology. These are Phenomenology (here & now), Dialogical Relationship (communicating through all forms of communication - voice, body, sensations - to enhance awareness), Field Theory (the client, their characteristics, perceptions and how this impacts and influences the client) and Experimentation (promoting action and curiosity). It is effective therapy for clients with depression, and addictions; particularly useful for clients who are emotionally frozen or stuck (Polster & Polster, 1974).
Grief Recovery Method™
(GRM™)
Grief is the normal and natural reaction to loss - whether that loss was caused by a death, the end of a relationship, loss of employment, or one of the over 40 significant life events that invoke experiences of grief and loss.The GRM TMis an action plan, where the client (the griever) takes a series of small steps that leads to the completion of the unresolved relationship associated with the loss. It is also effective for clients (grievers) dealing with those things they wish might have been different or better. Empowering them to address their dreams and hopes for the future, which is not the future they had planned and enables them to address the words left unspoken. It is also effective for clients with post-traumatic stress (James & Friedman, 2009).
Australian Institute of Family Counselling (AIFC)
Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT)
CFT allows the client to compassionately train their mind, which teaches the skills and attributes of compassion. This, in turn, enables and encourages the client to transform problematic patterns of cognition and emotion related to anxiety, anger, shame and self-criticism. It is effective therapy for clients with depression, post-natal emotional trauma, childhood abuse or trauma; enabling the client to feel safe and secure, self-accepted and comforted. (Gilbert, 2010).
Trauma Informed Therapy
As a trauma informed therapist I walk alongside my client as they journey through the mire of their trauma or adverse life experiences, while creating a safe haven where the client is nurtured in a calm and inviting environment. Through developing a therapeutic relationship with the client their story is validated and affirmed, where the client feels secure and heard enabling and empowering the client to find their voice and place boundaries in the relationships.
Clients dealing with trauma are not always receptive to the therapeutic process and utilising treatment techniques that repeatedly confront clients with the horrific details of the trauma or lived adverse experience that haunts them can cause them to be avoidant, reactionary or completely withdraw. It is painful for clients and often does not feel like healing (Mcquary, 2022).
In his book “The Body Keeps the Scores” Bessel Van Der Kolk describes,
“Traumatised people are often afraid of feeling... their own physical sensations that are now the enemy. Apprehension about being hijacked by uncomfortable sensations keeps the body frozen and the mind shut. Even though the trauma is a thing of the past, the emotional brain keeps generating sensations that make the sufferer feel scared and helpless” (Van Der Kolk, 2015, p. 208).
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is based on Adaptive Information Processing (AIP), which due to maladaptive programming or and /or inadequate processing of the traumatic or disturbing adverse life experiences has diminished the clients capacity to incorporate these experiences in an adaptive approach.
Therapy targets the clients past experiences, their current triggers, and any potential future issues. This results in an improvement of the clients current symptoms, a reduction or eradication of suffering from their distressing memories; enhanced self-compassion and respite from regular intrusive thoughts and memories as well as resolving triggers (Mcquary, 2022) Bilateral Stimulation Techniques (BST) are utilised during session to facilitate the EMDR approach with clients to enable processing of past painful memories.
EMDR is effective for anxiety, depression, addictions, anger, shame associated with PTSD and C-PTSD.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
CBT utilises a combination of behavioural and cognitive principles in the treatment of clinical problems.
CBT empowers clients to identify, evaluate, and modify their own dysfunctional thoughts and beliefs carried out through the examination of levels of cognition, cognitive schemas, and cognitive distortions. It is effective therapy for clients with anxiety, anxiety disorders such as social phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder or posttraumatic stress, and depression - particularly for clients preferring not to use medications (Nathan, Smith, Juniper, Kingsep & Lim, 2003).
Mindfulness
Mindfulness allows the client to embrace awareness by paying purposeful attention in their present moment, non-judgementally, to things as they are. It is effective therapy for clients with stress, anxiety and depression (Williams & Penman, 2011).
Schema Focused Therapy
Schema healing involves diminishing the intensity of the clients' experiences resulting from toxic childhood experiences. Therapy utilises cognitive, affective, and behavioural methods to enable schematic healing. Schemas have often developed over a long pattern of a client's life, with deeply ingrained beliefs about themself and the world. In order to overcome and remove these ingrained beliefs, the client and therapist collaboration is both long and intense. Schemas generally begin at an early age and are therefore all the client is familiar with. It is effective therapy for clients with negative thinking styles, self-criticism, posttraumatic stress, childhood abuse or trauma (Young, Klosko & Weishaar, 2006).
Somatic Experience (SE) Techniques
When trauma is entrenched and the client is creating self-perpetuating cycles of re-traumatisation through revisiting the trauma, flashbacks, dreams, nightmares; SE is an effective way that enables clients to step out of these patterns.
Where the client learns to distinguish their trauma by their symptoms rather than by the actual traumatic event itself. In doing this clients are empowered to create an alternative perspective that allows them to identify their triggers when these occur.
This results in the client being better able to follow their natural reactions instead of impeding their natural predispositions to heal rather than harm (Levine, 1997). SE is effective for clients with anxiety, depression, addictions, anger, shame associated with PTSD and C-PTSD
Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy
IFS sees the client as a family of parts that are all working in close proximity and at differing levels of maturity, impulsiveness, understanding, and pain. Each part develops a pathway that when one part changes it can have both a disruptive and detrimental impact on the other parts. IFS utilises the client’s inner resources and self-compassion to empower and enable emotional healing at the clients centre.
The client has created these parts as an automatic built-in protective process to manage their inner turmoil (Anderson, Sweezy & Schwartz, 2017). IFS is effective for clients with anxiety, depression, addictions, anger, shame associated with PTSD and C-PTSD.
Narrative Therapy (NT)
NT utilises the importance of language, such that certain words and phrases come to have technical meanings within this theoretical field. The client is deemed to be the expert on their own life and the therapeutic alliance is formed as a partnership in which the therapist is a consultant. As the consultant, the therapist, is consulted about possible alternative interpretations, techniques for breaking apart old, no-longer-useful stories, and seeing how to put together new narratives that are helpful in building a life. The client and therapist enter a partnership, becoming co-authors and collaborators who share the responsibility for shaping the treatment process. It is effective therapy for young children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly; empowering and encouraging them to be less cautious, while engaging with the possibility of positive change, as they put their thoughts and emotions into perspective. (Prochaska & Norcross, 2018).
Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT)
SFBT starts with the belief that the client is capable of constructing solutions to improve their life. Therapy empowers the client to look at solutions rather than focusing on problems. It is effective therapy for clients with eating disorders, relationship problems, anxiety, depression, substance abuse and behavioural problem (Corey, 2017).
Polyvagal Informed Therapy (PIT)
Polyvagal theory was developed by Prof Stephen Porges in 1966 and Prof Deb Dana went on to embrace his work, utilising his theory to develop Polyvagal Informed Therapy (Dana, 2020).
Polyvagal theory provides a theoretical basis for a neuroscience of safety and responses to perceived or real threat that clients experience in life. Humans need to socialise in order to co-regulate and this need is to be in relationship with others that nurtures and enhances health, growth, and restoration. The autonomic nervous system (ANS) or the self-preservation part of the brain, is constantly sending and searching for cues for safety and risk to life. When the client has not been nurtured or has been traumatised these neural pathways are disrupted resulting in the clients inability to self-regulate. (Porges, 2020).
PIT enables the client to recognise when their nervous system has gone “off-line” or overwhelmed and how to bring it back “on-line” through self-regulation (Schwartz, 2021). The polyvagal connection empowers the client to create a pathway between their mind and body enabling them to keep calm or prepare for action
PIT is effective for clients with anxiety, depression, addictions, anger, and shame associated with PTSD and C-PTSD.