Amanda Lees

Over 20 years of counselling experience, empowering clients with helpful strategies and perspectives, and offering a warm and open professional environment.

I can help you with:

• handling difficult emotions
• adjusting to change (from loss, migration, life transitions)
• healing and growing from adverse or hard experiences
• self-identity and worth
• relationship challenges (work, or personal, or aloneness)
• desires to grow and have a meaningful life journey

What does counselling have to offer?

Many people find talking in an independent, safe, and open environment can provide simple relief. Additionally, counselling can provide strategies for dealing with difficulties. It can give people new perspectives on themselves, others or the situation. And, it can help people understand and change their life patterns. These factors can reduce the challenges associated with difficult current or past experiences.

How do I work?

I endeavour to offer the above, to work at your pace, to tailor my approach to you, and to support you as you work through issues. I like to nurture your strengths and focus on building your capacity. I offer both short-term and long-term counselling.

Clients have said they appreciate my good listening skills, attentiveness, encouragement and support, my clarity and wisdom, and the coping strategies offered. They also report feeling comfortable, feeling understood and respected, and finding it easy to talk with me.

Counselling Approach

While I have a humanistic approach and diverse skills, I particularly value a therapy approach called Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP). It believes in our capacity to heal and to connect with our drive to grow (this is the energy in us that wants to heal). It emphasises the counsellor staying in tune with people as they progress through their issues.

I take a holistic view of people, by focussing on well-being (not just pathology), and by incorporating neuroscience’s learnings about the body-mind-heart-gut connections. My understanding is that emotions are essential to our well-being, and we need to work effectively with them. I have taken courses on neuroscience, trauma, our internal subpersonalities, ecotherapy, mindfulness, spirituality.

About Me

With over 20 years of counselling work, I offer a solid base of experience. I have dealt with a breadth of concerns. My work has primarily been with adults and tertiary students from a range of age-groups, genders, ethnicities, and cultural groups.

My life experiences include parenting, market research, local authority planning, co-ordinating spirituality services at a university, and volunteering in human and environmental arenas.