About
Empowering Minds, Healing Hearts
At Soul at Heart Counselling, Lorraine specialises in providing compassionate, effective talking and creative therapies to support clients in improving their mental health and well-being. Some clients struggle to find the words so art therapy is used alongside talking therapies to support the client to identify their story.
My primary modality as a Psychotherapeutic Counsellor stems from Jeff Young's Relational Schema Therapy and Heinz Kohuts Empathic Attunement and transference. I adopted these modalities over time, as they are flexible and Integrative with mainstream models such as CBT and Gestalt. They are inclusive and can address a wide range of current-day emotional concerns or past unprocessed trauma. Allowing me to blend my training as a Buddhist-informed mindfulness counsellor and a mainstream psychotherapist. Therefore the integrative modalities include Mindfulness, creativity therapy, getting to know the Transpersonal aspects of our being, Client-Centered and CBT / Dialectical approaches. I combine these theories of understanding the mind and emotions to allow me to offer both short-term Counselling and longer-term Psychotherapeutic support for clients who may have had frequent troubling thoughts and behaviours that have lasted for many years or perhaps only begun recently due to current life changes, such as bereavement or a relationship separation.
Symptoms are often a natural part of being human, sometimes they protect us, as a way for us to feel safe or to understand and make sense of our experiences and come to terms with what we can or cannot change. The associated feelings can be disruptive long term, usually creating a sense of anxiety or changing mood states, energy depletion, tearfulness or anger which is present not only in the mind but sometimes in the body too, (such as aches and pains or headaches or fibromyalgia).
When we are not functioning in healthy ways we may find ourselves at the stage of having to mask feelings. Another aspect is that we cannot find the words to describe the experiences, which can lead to feeling or being 'testy' around others and blaming others for our condition, even if we are not sure if that is true. Perhaps you cry often, and after a good cry you may even feel better for a while, yet you know you have still avoided the reason for your feelings, emotions or memories which seem too hard to look at and so you continue to push it all down.
If you are now looking for a counsellor it can be because the process of holding it in is too exhausting and difficult to maintain. In therapy, I help you find the language of your symptoms so that you have the words to know what is happening. This alleviates the fear of the unknown, you can take back control of yourself and your life.
I look forward to meeting you if this feels like a good fit for you and aligns with what you would like to gain from therapy
Empowering Minds, Healing Hearts
Soul at Heart Counselling was founded in 2017 by Lorraine Anderson, a qualified registered BACP therapist with a passion for helping individuals with their mental, emotional and spiritual health. Lorraine has always lived in Plymouth, Devon. However, some of her training took place in other areas, such as London, at the Psychosynthesis Institute, which taught her to embrace and understand how to embody soul work into therapy, ethically and safely.
With nearly eight consecutive years in Private Practice, I have helped countless clients overcome their struggles and find healing, alleviation from underlying fears, and traumas and experience personal growth in the process. I use an integrative range of talking therapies to underpin the work, including schema therapy, mindfulness cognitive behavioural therapy, person-centered therapy, Buddhist-informed understanding of the mind and body relationship, short meditations, anxiety-reducing breath work, creativity, inner child work and much more.