DREW HORT
My Services
Counselling & Family Therapy
Myth: Counselling is only for people with serious mental health problems
Fact: Problems that start out as everyday concerns can build up and, if not dealt with, spiral out of control. Counselling offers you a chance to deal with day-to-day concerns and find real and effective coping strategies for them.
Myth: Counselling is only for weak people
Fact: There is nothing weak about seeing a counsellor. It fact it takes a lot of strength, honesty and insight to identify an area of your life in which you may have become stuck and need to grow and evolve. Strength rather than weakness is then needed to remove these barriers to growth and happiness. Counselling helps us to realise that very often our fear is unfounded; it is nothing more than false evidence appearing real and that everything we want is on the other side of this fear.
My life experience outside of psychological counselling as a musician, teacher, chef, business owner, traveler and surfer have enabled me a broader worldview, thus allowing me a holistic counselling approach. By holistic, I mean that in a counselling setting the ‘voices’ of the child, parent, teacher, friend and other professionals are all heard when addressing an issue. Finding the ‘voice’ of the silenced stakeholder is key to a truly holistic counselling approach. I offer talk therapy/counselling to individuals and family groups.
Experiential Play Therapy
Working within and beyond a positive psychology framework, interventions aimed at increasing well-being are best designed around a child’s sense of curiosity. Paints, clay, musical instruments, hammers and nails, mixing bowls and spoons, bats and balls, balloons and bubbles, indoors and outdoors, the child will show where their sense of curiosity lies. The secret is in allowing the journey to unfold, and the stream of consciousness to flow. The aim being to inspire wonder, amazement, creativity, love of learning, appreciation of beauty, gratitude and hosts of other positive emotions that may lead to well-being. The result is very often pure alchemy; a little piece of ‘gold’ is created, seen, or experienced, where none previously existed.
I am passionate about the psychosocial development of children: starting in early childhood with the child’s development of a “self” to where they gain a more complex concept of themselves in middle childhood and finally search for their identity in the adolescent years. Early childhood, middle childhood and adolescence pose unique and specific challenges to our children. Very young children normally have an all or nothing based self-esteem, becoming more defined in middle childhood where feelings of competence or incompetence in tasks greatly affect their feelings of self-worth. Children become more aware of their own and other people’s emotions making them more vulnerable to parental conflict, divorce, bullying and various other social stresses and anxiety. Adolescents face increasing exam stresses and future career choice decisions and may also become involved in risky behaviour as they search for their own identity and independence.
Play or experiential therapy/counselling is aimed at removing the minor obstacles in a child’s life so they don’t become major roadblocks to their self-actualization (living to their potential in all spheres of life). I try to create a completely safe, relaxing and inviting atmosphere in which the child may continue to grow.
Holistic subject choice and career path assessments
Choosing the best-fit school subjects is of vital importance for future career direction as well as overall enjoyment and success at school.To make this choice, your child needs to have acquired self-knowledge relating to his or her innate strengths, abilities, interests and overall uniqueness.
For this line of my work, which is aimed at high school students, I am assisted administratively by my wife Toni, who as an experienced high school teacher adds contextual insight. We market ourselves to schools as “Flourishing Futures” and have been conducting subject choice assessments for the past few years with joyous success.
Flourishing Futures is committed to providing assessments and interpretations that will be both beneficial and meaningful to you and your child. We offer an incredibly holistic and affordable subject choice assessment that is much more than usual number crunching, impersonal data-driven psychometric tests. Yes, there is a psychometric element to the assessments, but everything is context-driven, focused on the unique individual and their place in the world.
TOWARDS FLOURISHING AND OVERALL WELL-BEING
