Individual & Couples Counselling — Charles Clark Counselling

I’m Charles Clark, and I really help people to learn to trust themselves and to feel worthy to ask for what they need. I’ve had my practice here now for six months. We started in Johannesburg, and we moved down here for the lifestyle and the ocean and the people.

Life can feel intolerably difficult for people at times. And often for people it’s being caught between what their head is saying and what their body is saying, what they’re thinking and what they’re feeling. We can end up acting out in ways that we don’t even understand.

Emotions, getting in touch with what we feel, they can be very prickly and painful to actually get in touch with. Fear, desire, rejection, anger, you know, they were just forbidden feelings. Look to them for vital information that they have to supply us.

And this view of ourselves as being a product of early development is called attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth and others. The theory is that we’re, as human beings, wired for connection, and that this capacity to be connected with ourselves firstly, and then with the people around us, lies at the heart of human intimacy and of human flourishing. It is that approach that I use as I work with clients.

What I really want people to be able to do at the end of therapy is be able to feel a sense of worthiness about themselves: feel that their needs, their feelings, their preferences are worthy of consideration, at least the same kind of consideration they would give anybody else’s, and that they can identify them, they can locate them and give them the validation that they deserve. I want people to be able to say, ‘This is what I need and this is what I feel,’ and to do so confidently and unabashedly.

You know, we expect so much from these romantic relationships, and rightly so. This is the person that you’re going to spend the rest of your life with, but often just come so poorly prepared into the enterprise of a marriage or a relationship, and we bring with us into these relationships a history. We actually find that this relationship, which is the most important thing in our life, is also the thing that’s bringing us the most pain.

And so what I’m wanting to do with couples is for them to learn the kind of skills that will allow them to, first of all, gain access to their own vulnerabilities in a life, and then learn the skills to be able to communicate those vulnerabilities to their partner.

So therapy with a couple is often an opportunity for someone to be in the room who can keep redirecting them back to the source of the problem, to the core and the heart of it. Because when you’re in the middle of that argument, and in the middle of the fight, all of this becomes completely clouded. Below that, there’s a child who’s feeling abandoned, hurt or rejected. Relationships with intimate partners bring out our most primitive fears and feelings.

What I want couples to do when they leave my office is to be able to look at their partner and say, ‘I see you, I hear you, I’m here for you.’ But likewise, ‘I feel like I can bring a level of honesty and openness to this relationship that would also allow you to see me.’ That level of trust in each other.