Faith based counselling is for believers who want the life of faith brought into therapy, not set aside for an hour and picked up afterwards. At Embodied Healing this is not a different therapy from the rest of the practice. It is the same relational, experiential work, with room for the vertical relationship with Christ to meet the horizontal relationships of ordinary life.

Many people who follow Jesus already know the private divide. They speak of God in church and of pain in a consulting room, and the two conversations rarely touch. Shame stays unnamed. Grief is spiritualised too quickly or avoided because it feels unfaithful to admit how much it hurts. A marriage is prayed for and never quite spoken about. A part of you that is angry with God, or tired of trying, is kept out of both rooms. This service is for that meeting place. You do not have to perform your faith here, and you do not have to leave it in the car park.

A relational and experiential approach

The counselling is relational and experiential, grounded in Gestalt psychotherapy. Gestalt is an embodied way of working. It takes the whole situation into account: emotion, body, mind, relationships, environment and spirit. We begin in the present, with what you know of your experience and the meaning you have made of what has happened. The aim is awareness, and awareness restores choice.

We notice how you relate here, with me, and how that same pattern may show up with a partner, a parent, a child, a congregation, or with God. A harsh inner voice can wear religious language and still be shame. The way you disappear in conflict at home can be the same way you go quiet in prayer.

Experiments in the session are small and safe: a sentence never said aloud, a feeling held in the body, a prayer more honest than polished. Where it serves, we can also work with parts of you that seem at odds. This does not replace faith. It gives faith something true to work with.

The vertical and the horizontal

Christian faith is not only a set of beliefs to be defended. It is a relationship. The vertical relationship is your life with Christ: prayer, Scripture, worship, conscience, calling, and the slow work of being formed. The horizontal relationships are the ones you live on the ground: marriage, parenting, friendship, church, work, and the care you give and find difficult to receive.

These are not two worlds. Bringing the vertical into the horizontal is a willingness to let love of God inform love of neighbour, and to let the truth of your actual life inform how you pray. A faith that cannot bear your real marriage, your real grief, or your real fatigue is a faith under strain. Therapy can be one place where that strain is allowed to speak.

What people bring

People come for many reasons, and not all of them look spiritual at the door. Some are in a hard marriage and want counsel that can honour both the covenant and the person in the room. Some are carers, weary from looking after a partner, a parent or a child, and unsure how to ask for help without guilt.

Others come with grief that has no tidy testimony: bereavement, the loss of a hoped-for child, a faith gone quiet, a church that hurt them, or a calling that no longer fits. Some want to work with anxiety, shame, anger or numbness, or with an inner part that feels far from God. You do not need a crisis. You do need honesty about what is figure now.

How faith is held in the room

Faith is invited, not imposed. You set the pace. We may pray. We may sit with a passage of Scripture and notice what it stirs, not only what it instructs. We may name what you sense of the Holy Spirit’s leading, when that is what you want and when it serves the work. We may also spend a session with no religious language at all, because the most faithful thing in that hour is to tell the truth about what hurts, or what you have been carrying alone.

I will not use the session to evangelise you, correct your doctrine, or recruit you to a position. This service is for believers who want their faith included. If something in the work needs your pastor, a spiritual director, or your own church, we can name that boundary. Counselling is not a substitute for pastoral care, and pastoral care is not a substitute for therapy. They can sit alongside one another.

I will not hurry you to a redemptive ending. Unfinished business is respected: the conversation never had, the feeling not allowed. Often the more honest prayer comes after the feeling has been allowed, not before.

Professional ground

I am a clinical member of the Christian Counsellors Association of Australia. That membership sits alongside my practice as a PACFA-registered counsellor and psychotherapist. The work is accountable to counselling ethics and to a Christian understanding of the person made in the image of God, capable of real damage and real restoration, and not reducible to a diagnosis or a spiritual verdict.

You choose what we work on, the language we use, and whether faith is explicit in a session or held quietly in the background. Confidentiality is kept in the ordinary professional way, with the usual legal limits. Nothing you bring is treated as a failure of belief. If church has been a place of harm, we can work with that without requiring you to defend the institution, or to abandon your faith in order to be taken seriously.

What a session is like

A first session is a conversation about what matters now. We look at the relationships, events and experiences that have shaped you, including your life of faith if you want it in the room.

Sessions are available face to face and online by video. Between sessions the work is mostly awareness: what you feel in the body, and where a more honest sentence or prayer might belong. Change is usually quiet. It looks like a little more choice where you used to disappear, and a faith that can include the life you are actually living.

If that is the work you are looking for, you are welcome to begin.