New Premises for St Neots Clients!

 Announcing the opening of my new counselling premises in Eaton Socon, providing a local, in-person service for people in St Neots, Cambridgeshire and the surrounding towns and villages. 

My office can be found within the Realfit Centre gym, next door to Bill's Boxing Gym and Peppercorns Academy of Music & Theatre. We have ample, free parking and sessions can be booked most Mondays to Thursdays, days and evenings. 

To book your counselling session (including an initial free, 20-minute phone call), please contact:

Anna Hayward

Not Like the Others Counselling & Training,

c/o Realfit Centre

Unit 2, 19 Little End Road,

Eaton Socon,

St Neots, Cambs.
PE19 8JH

Text: 07535 211066

Email: aeh323@gmail.com

Or find me on my website at: https://www.notliketheothers.co.uk

Creating my counselling space

I am a member of Realfit gym myself, and for the last few months, have regularly walked past the little used office that is now my counselling room. Having worked mostly online now for almost 3 years, I decided now was the time to take the plunge and find a physical premises. Online is OK, but many of my clients, especially locally, would like to see their counsellor face-to-face.

Every time I saw that room, I'd say, 'What a shame. It would be a perfect counselling room'. I even joked about moving in there and setting up shop, when they weren't looking!

In the end, I thought I should stop joking and just go for what I wanted, so I arranged a meeting with the proprietor, K... only to go down with Covid for two weeks!

So it was, that a couple of weeks later, and still coughing from the after-effects of Covid (but blissfully negative), I finally had the meeting we'd planned, and K gave me his blessing to go ahead. 

I've had a lot of fun in these last few weeks getting furnishings, pictures and creating a welcoming environment for my clients, and a comfortable place for me to work. B&M just over the road proved a useful resource, as did the wonders of my own over-cluttered house.  Gradually, things came together and now all the room needs is a sign on the door! 

I am really proud to work in the Realfit Centre. Regards physical health, they have that 'can do' attitude that everyone (even someone as unfit as myself) can improve their fitness. For a person who loathed PE lessons as a child, I have found myself remarkably comfortable and at-ease with their personal trainers and coaches.  Despite the recent bout of Covid, I am much fitter and healthier than I was. They do not judge, they just encourage. 

And that's what I hope to do in my counselling work - help people feel at ease with themselves, not judged, just encouraged, however they present themselves. 

If you want to know more about Realfit Centre itself (as opposed to my little corner of it), please follow this link. Realfit offer a week's free trial which is a brilliant deal. 

Realfit St Neots (realfitcentre.co.uk)

How Neurodiversity-Informed Counselling Can Help

 

My style of counselling draws mostly from the Person-Centred Approach, a way of counselling first invented by psychologist Carl Rogers in the 1960s. This is an approach which assumes you, the client, are the expert on your own life, and that inside you, you already have everything you need to be a fulfilled, self-accepting person. Underneath all of your difficulties and struggles, your true, authentic self and all of your potential is still there, waiting to be discovered. You just need the right environment for it to show itself.

• Difficulty identifying emotions (sometimes called Alexithymia)
• Disliking eye-contact
• Lack of facial expression (sometimes called 'blunt affect')
• Atypical body language e.g. looking angry when stressed, looking bored when concentrating, fidgeting even when not anxious etc
• Need for very detailed, precise instructions
• Very literal way of communicating
• Sensory overload and sensory distractions
• Cognitive 'inertia' - difficulty starting, stopping or changing direction on a task
• Low self-esteem (from having differences seen as faults)
• Social anxiety (making getting to know a counsellor quite scary)

So as your counsellor, I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm sure you've already had plenty of advice: If it worked, you wouldn't feel the need to consider counselling. What I can do is listen - without judgement and work with you to figure out your thoughts and feelings and separate the 'shoulds' from the 'what is'.

Well so far, I've described Person-Centred counselling. How does that differ when you're an autistic person, Aspergers, ADHD or other Neurodivergences (ND)?

In a way, it doesn't. Every neurodivergent person is an individual, and we are all unique. But there are particular difficulties autistic and other ND people commonly experience. The most common of which is that we are different to most of the people around us. Yes, we are all different, but some of us are more different than others. And being different often means we are frequently misunderstood and may have a lot of negative experiences, leading to us trying to 'mask' or cover up our ND traits to better fit in. After many years, that masking becomes more and more automatic, and we can lose our sense of who we really are, underneath the mask.

In the old days of the Neurodiversity movement (as it's now called), autistic people used to gather on the internet (Usenet Newsgroups). We used to refer to one another as 'ACs', meaning 'Autistics and cousins'. The 'cousins' sometimes referred to other neurodivergent individuals (those with ADHD, Tourettes, dyslexia etc), but generally we referred to each other as 'cousins'. There was a kind of invisible bond between us. Not that we were the same, but like distant cousins in a real family, we had enough in common to recognise one another's struggles.

I still sense that bond to this day. It can be a joy when talking to a stranger at a conference or whatever, and you are both struggling with a similar problem e.g. the lack of literal language in the conference leaflet, sensory overload in the conference hall, embarrassment about fidgeting ('stimming' we call it in the ND world) or tics. Having a counsellor who is neurodivergent can be a great relief when you don't have to explain or justify why you find certain things hard. And even if I don't have that problem personally, you can bet your bottom dollar that I know someone who does, a friend or a relative!

So, here's a list of some of the common issues we have to adapt to, when counselling a neurodivergent person:

Some of this is because of autism and/or ADHD - but a lot of this is because people have a lot of trauma from how they've been treated, because of being ND and different. Sometimes that trauma is from people with the best of intentions - teachers, parents, previous therapists etc. So as your counsellor, I try to take all of this on board: not making assumptions but bearing in mind what sorts of things I might learn about you and being prepared to adapt my approach to meet your needs.

For example, a client might have a lot of difficulty knowing what sort of things to talk about in a counselling session. That's OK - my former tutor used to say, 'Something will emerge'. 

She's right - it usually does. And the thing you first think of is often a good place to begin. But it's hard when you're an ND person who is always careful to try to say the 'right' things and you are afraid of judgement. But I will occasionally adapt my approach by suggesting a place to start. Once we're off, we're off!

Another example is a very socially anxious client who may be scared to meet the counsellor (even over Zoom). So, adapting my practice to allow a trusted friend or relative to be there for the introduction can help.

As for things like facial expression and atypical body language - the key here is knowing that each individual may have different expressions and body language, but I just have to get to know you, and learn how you show your feelings, and we're fine.

Mostly, counselling ND individuals is about accepting difference and believing in my clients. Which, ironically, is how I work with everybody - ND or Neurotypical (ie Muggle). 

Not Like the Others - Origin Story

Not Like the Others started off life as a blog, as a place to vent about my experiences (good and bad) as an autistic student counsellor. I received a lot of feedback along the lines of 'Me too!' and 'That's my experience too!', so I knew I was on the right track.

About 6 years ago, I was at a National Autistic Society conference, when someone asked me what I did for a living. I explained that I had ambitions to 'Get a job that doesn't exist'. When asked what that job was, I answered 'A specialist counsellor to neurodivergent people, especially fellow autistics'.

Well since then, there have been many changes, not least of the fact that there are many 'neurodivergent counsellors' groups, and a ton of CPD courses and talks to help counsellors be more autism-aware. In fact I run such courses myself! (on the grounds that if you want a job doing, do it yourself).

I qualified as a counsellor, despite my many struggles. Along the way, I read a lot of books, went to a lot of courses, and best of all, worked with many autistic clients. In fact, my training placement was with a small autism charity called Autism Hub, part of A.L.A.G (the All London Asperger Group).

So now I am excited to be going into Private Practice, and of course, I had to call it Not Like the Others Counselling & Training, because I'm... well, not like the others. Or as a great autistic friend likes to say, 'Unique, like everyone else'.

And that is the philosophy of my practice: that you, whether you are autistic, ADHD or even 'neurotypical', you are a unique person, and you deserve counselling that celebrates that fact.