Debbie Inkpen (MBACP)

About me

Hello and welcome to my counselling profile

Taking the first step to talk to a counsellor about how you are feeling can feel daunting and may make you feel anxious and uncertain about sharing your private thoughts and feelings with someone that you haven't yet met.

Sometimes we can hold on to our worries and try to keep going thinking that we don't want to bother anyone or hoping that our problems might go away. Negative thoughts and feelings can affect how we go about our daily lives. This in turn can affect our mood, behaviour and impact upon our relationships and other areas of our life.

I will aim to work with you at your own pace, offering a calm, safe space for you to explore your worries and concerns no matter how big or how small you think they may be. I believe that through talking things through in a therapeutic relationship with a counsellor we have the ability to find our own answers and to make sense of the things that have been troubling us.  Sometime these worries may stem from things that have happened in our past or may be something that has happened more recently.

I am a person-centred counsellor and use an integrative approach, which means that I draw on my knowledge from different modalities and theories and from my on going professional training. In being person-centred this means that you choose what you want to talk about. I will work with you in a non-judgemental way offering you the core conditions central to person-centred counselling of empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard.

Experience

I have been working therapeutically and peripatetically with a mixed client base of adults, children and young people for over 10 years in a variety of settings which includes schools, homes and the wider community.  This therapeutic work has involved working collaboratively with families and having individual 1:1 sessions with children and young people.

I have been seeing clients at The Banbury Therapy Centre for over two years and am currently working for the Children's Voice service within Oxfordshire Family Mediation.

Children and Young People

Children and young people do not always have the words to express how they are feeling which can at times show in their behaviour and mood. They may be experiencing stress and anxiety for a variety of reasons that may not be apparent and it can be difficult trying to understand what may be going on for them. In my work with children and young people I use a variety of creative interventions to help them find ways to express themselves and have their thoughts and feelings heard.

Our counselling work together

I will work with you to help you feel listened to without feeling judged, where you can  feel respected and valued and where we can work together to build honesty and trust in our counselling relationship.

These will be your sessions to help you make sense of difficult feelings and unhelpful ways of thinking in order to help you move forward to find your own solutions.

I will aim to work sensitively, creatively and intuitively with you in order to empower you to help make sense of the things that have been troubling you and to make the positive changes that you want in your life.