Sue Lewis
Qualifications
- Bachelor of Arts major Psychology (South Africa)
- Post Graduate Diploma in Counselling (Australia)
- Post Graduate Diploma in Further Education (South Africa)
Experience
- 7 years social worker/community support/counselling
- 4 years counselling
- Youthline Triage
- Provisional Member of New Zealand Association of Counsellors
Behind the Bullet Points
As you will see, I possess qualifications from both South Africa and Australia. But I was born in Zimbabwe. And now I live in New Zealand.
The point to all that is that I have experienced relocating and finding my feet several times.
Consequently, I understand that the only constant in life is change. And change can be frightening and unsettling.
I qualified as a counsellor in 2012 after a long career in teaching and working with young people.
I bring a wide range of experience and skills to my counselling work having counselled in high schools, given therapeutic art classes for children, worked in adult education and in the healthcare and business sectors. Currently I work as a school counsellor in two different schools and relish my private practice.
I enjoy working with people of all age groups whatever the challenge. I make use of aspects of interactive art, narrative therapy and transactional analysis to assist in the journey of how your well-being is impacted.
What is Transactional Analysis?
You may be familiar with a book called “The Games People Play”. This was written by Dr Eric Berne in the 1960s and became a best seller because it spoke in ordinary language about how our personalities work.
Berne described the way we communicate as a “transaction” and developed the theory that by being mindful of how we interact with each other, we can identify our unique way of co-responding. Noting this and exploring alternatives can be helpful in changing how we link with the world around us.
Narrative Therapy and Interactive Drawing Therapy
As its name implies, Narrative Therapy encourages us to tell our story. We place the problem firmly separate from the person and explores the many skills we all have to help reduce the influence of these problems in our lives.
Interactive drawing uses right-brain drawing and metaphors to complement and extend the more common left-brain talking and reasoning processes. By seeing an image on a page separate from ourselves, we can see more objectively.
