Maggie Murray

Compassion Focused Counsellor/Psychotherapist

January 2024 - a warm welcome to my profile

I am offering face to face appointments within the Lincoln area. Online and telephone therapy within the UK 

Therapy offers you an opportunity to bring closer attention to your current ways of thinking, behaving and responding to yourself and others. Looking at your past and present life experiences, and identifying your own needs now.

It's not your fault if things feel tough right now, we all have complex human brains that cause us suffering at times. However you can choose to take responsibility as an adult and focus your attention on your mental and physical wellbeing.

That is a choice we all have as human beings. We can all find ways to maintain safe habitual behaviours, and make healthy lifestyles choices focusing on developing creative, curious and wiser minds.

How you can achieve this is to participate in a therapy process with me and make a commitment to yourself to be open to learning 

Let's work through 3 steps together;

1. Courage - to be vulnerable, to be open, and accepting of what is going on right now. Willingness to reflect on how your earlier life messages, experiences, and influences have impacted your sense of self. 

2. Change - through exploration and self-awareness, development and growth will occur. A focus of gratitude is fundamentally important to a person's wellbeing as is feeling appreciation, rather than the need to feel happy all the time or striving for perfection which can not realistically be maintained.

You will have the opportunity to take responsibility for what doesn't feel right and find new ways to be more compassionate towards yourself and others to improve your mental wellbeing.

3. Continue - throughout the therapeutic process you will gain a deeper understanding of yourself and be on a new pathway to focusing your attention on living your life with more contentment through alleviating your distress.

My focus and promise to you is to be on that pathway with you as you develop the skills, knowledge and self-awareness through our discoveries and explorations together. I support my clients from a compassionate and mindful perspective.

Therapy takes commitment from both the client and counsellor as the therapeutic relationship is paramount for you to feel safe, held and supported throughout the therapy process.

Who do I offer Counselling too?

Adults 18 +

Specialism in Compassion;

Why do we need compassion?
Because life can be incredibly complex and challenging at times leaving us feeling out of control, uncertain or overwhelmed.
Living in the here and now from a more mindful approach to experiencing life with a calmer mind and compassionate focus towards our self and others will alleviate distress and tricky situations.

Understanding the three-system emotion regulation model gives us a clearer picture of how we can balance our emotions more effectively, shifting away from feeling out of control or overwhelmed which could bring us anxiety, stress, pain or suffering.
We can step back, pause, breathe, process and reflect.

It is not our fault what genes we were given, how our early life experiences evolved. If we feel limited by inner resources we have developed from learnt behaviours developed through family generations, however with our creative and curious new brains we can take responsibility for how we act now, how we choose to continue to develop and grow as our adult selves.

Threat system
Impacts our responses
When we look at what is happening in our lives right now there is so much pain and suffering occurring. This can impact on our own mental health and capacity to be resilient from all we are observing, hearing or experiencing. The consequences of this can be the difficulties in maintain healthy responses in our behaviours, communication and interactions internally and towards others.
Drive system
Take action
Developing a compassionate mind requires a focus on wisdom, understanding that evolution has built our human bodies with the capacity to feel physical pain and our minds have signals wired to look out for potential dangers. Therefore, this evolution of processing and feeling has left us experiencing ‘tricky brains.’ Compassion is recognising the pain and suffering within yourself and or others and the desire of take steps to alleviate the suffering.
Soothing system
Threat is felt in our body
What we can do to alleviate the pain and suffering is to take responsibility of making healthy choices for ourselves now?
The more orient our attention is to continuing feeling compassion for others, our self and from others the safer we will feel within our soothing system where we experience caring, kindness, calmness and safety. Our gentle internal dialogue of how we talk to ourselves is also paramount. Come and learn more....

Please contact me for further details about my current practice.

I welcome the opportunity to meet with you for a consultation session where we can share up to an hour to explore the possibilities of us engaging in a therapy process together.

Continued sessions will last up to 50 minutes on a weekly basis or as agreed at our consultation session.

Charges are:

£60.00 per session for adult clients.

Reduced fees can be discussed for people who are;

Trainee Counsellors  

Students 

Low income 

*Please provide me with a contact telephone number as my emails can sometimes go into people's spam boxes on first correspondence*  

I work collaboratively with a team of counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists  online and locally in my area.

I continue to support clients through, EAP's and self referrals within my private counselling practice. 

I support Students through Counselling and Mentoring.

I am starting my Clinical Supervision training in September 2022 and will be offering this service on completion of my training in 2023. 

Thank you for taking the time to read my page and I look forward to hearing from you with any questions you may have to see if I am the counsellor who you feel drawn to working with.