How is Emotional Therapeutic Counselling different from other forms of counselling?

ETC is a person-centred talking and creative therapy that helps clients who are experiencing distress in their lives. The distresses (or emotional blocks) can take the form of many emotions.

ETC uses various tools to help a person recognise, acknowledge, and manage repressed or suppressed emotional blocks. This therapeutic approach can also help you understand and connect with your Inner Child.

What is the Inner Child? The Inner Child is a powerful presence within our psyche, which often, and usually unconsciously, takes the centre stage in our ‘emotional world.’ A better way of understanding is to consider the Inner Child as the ‘wounded child’ – the child who experienced disruption or a negative childhood environment in their earlier years.

The ‘wounded child’ can hold us hostage to our past. Our child within holds all the positive and negative emotions we felt when we were young. The negative feelings would have been locked away. Suppressing our feelings and emotions may have been necessary when we were young as a protective barrier. We often feel an intense feeling of pain when we experience specific types of emotions as adults; these feelings are often linked and associated to episodes and behaviours from our childhood, and can include:

Rejection, Shame, Lack of Confident & Self-esteem, Guilt, Anger, Abandonment and Sadness

Experiences within our childhood have taught us how to feel and behave in certain situations. For example, we may have become use to accepting disappointment and rejection, always believing we are not good enough and accepting unreasonable behaviour from others (lack of boundaries). We may have also become use to disappointment as we may have learnt that things never work out for us. When we shut down our emotions, we become frozen as we try to protect ourselves. We become numb and we lose the ability to connect emotionally with others, known as emotional disconnect.

Healing your inner child involves you directing your conscious mind towards the feelings you have within you. Enabling yourself to bring them out from within and understand the challenges they have created for you in adulthood. Setting healthy personal boundaries; knowing what, where and who triggers your inner child, whilst bearing in mind, how past trauma informs present emotions.

Letting go of past hurt and pain is a crucial step in recovery. Releasing anger from the child state can free individuals from a multitude of presenting issues, including depression, anxiety, lack of self-worth, shame, poor temper, and self-sabotage (imposter syndrome).

Reflecting on childhood, how did you receive love, positive attention, affection, and punishment, or perhaps you didn’t receive these things? How do you engage in relationships today? What do you long for or fear? Were you allowed to show emotions and move through them?