0468 313 108
Becoming Connected Counselling
What is Internal Family Systems (IFS)?
In IFS therapy, you are offered exactly what you would expect from any counselling encounter: respect, empathy, attunement, care and deep listening.  You are invited to tell your story in your own time and at your own pace in the assurance that you will be heard with genuine curious interest, compassion and understanding.
In addition, IFS is a therapeutic system that gently and effectively works with dysfunctional personal responses to trauma to help you reconnect with your true self. IFS advocates eight core qualities that are our birthright: compassion, clarity, calm, curiosity, confidence, courage, creativity, and connectedness. When we return to these core qualities, we become the best version of ourselves. (You can find out more about IFS therapy here.)
Who is it for?
IFS therapy is applicable across a great range of life situations and is for all ages. (By the way, despite its name, it is aimed principally at individuals, although it is superb also in helping couples understand each other better.) It is highly effective in addressing and healing the problems associated with childhood developmental or adult trauma. It offers a way out of hard-to-shift depressed states and helps you source the origins of anxiety prior to making real and permanent change within your psyche. It also has a great track record in bringing calm balance to your system if you have become taken over by 'disorders', addictions, or have become overwhelmed by anger or other disabling emotional states. IFS helps you maintain Self-awareness and promotes strengthening bonds within intimate, familial and other relationships. IFS is, of course, LGBTQIAP-friendly.
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What can I expect in a Becoming Connected Counselling session?
Becoming Connected initial appointments are an hour and 15 minutes, with follow ups being 1 hour. During these times you can expect a deep working through of life issues, in order that you might connect more thoroughly to all parts of your system and for healing to occur. You can expect a continuity between sessions - each issue from the previous session will be revisited at the beginning of the next in order to aid integration and be a springboard for related issues.
How many sessions will I need?
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IFS can be applied to single issues where you can dip in and out of therapy as your needs arise. Many people who have discovered the depths and comprehensive nature of the model do, however, like to return for an extended series of sessions. Typically a client can expect to meet for five to six sessions.
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Please contact me by email or phone if you wish to engage for the first time with Becoming Connected Counselling.
“If you consider your thoughts, emotions, urges and impulses to be coming from an inner landscape that's best understood as a kind of internal family, populated by sub-personalities, many of whom are childlike and are suffering, then it makes more sense to take that next step of comforting and holding these inner selves rather than just observing and objectifying them. All (you) need to do to begin exploring this apparently chaotic and mysterious inner world is to focus inside with genuine curiousity and start asking questions..."
Dick Schwartz, IFS Founder
About Richard Wigley
Trusted Psychotherapist
Since 2014, I've been counselling clients from the Canberra region in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and existential therapies. Over the past four years I have also incorporated Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy into my practice, which is a great way to help clients facilitate personal growth, be more present to their life and take charge of their decision making.
I have a background in the study of psychology and humanistic philosophy through the University of Sussex, the ANU, UNE and the University of Canberra. I am a Level 2 trained IFS practitioner and a clinical registrant of PACFA (Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia).
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Where do I practice?
At two handy locations in Canberra, ACT, Australia:
Garema Place, Civic & Cook; also online to anywhere in the world
(Phone or email for further details)
Pricing
My intention is to make IFS as affordable as possible. To this end, lower cost sessions can be arranged by negotiation;Â please feel free to discuss your needs upon first contact.
I hid from myself
All the parts of me I hated,
Willing them to be buried for ever
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And the more I stopped my ears,
The more they cried, reminding me I was worthless.
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But one day, in a moment of trembling courage,
I turned to them.
Looking with wonder at their sad suffering,
I asked them what they might need?
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"For you to come back
To the self you lost
Before the layers began"
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And I couldn't help but hold those exiled
ones close
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And together we took the first faltering steps
On the journey of connection
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Privacy
Your personal information belongs to you. Becoming Connected Counselling takes its obligation to your personal information seriously. You can read all about our policy here.