I have been working as a Counsellor and Psychotherapist for twelve years. My career journey started in a very different direction as when I left school I studied and qualified as a Chartered Accountant. I worked in this field for 20 years. In my mid thirties I found myself acknowledging that this work was not fulfilling me and I started to explore ways that I could encourage the side of me that was fascinated by people, how the mind works and a strong desire to be able to contribute to life by helping others. I started by doing voluntary work assisting people experiencing financial difficulty and through this I noticed how many people’s difficulties stemmed from mental and emotional struggles. I found my passion for wanting to be able to help people live their lives a fully as possible and to be to help them with the struggles and suffering that life brings. This led my to starting my degree in Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Training and Qualifications
I qualified as a Counsellor and Psychotherapist with a BA (Hons) from Cork Institute of Technology. I learned about how our personalities develop, what causes difficulty in our lives psychologically and ways to be able to work with people to overcome these difficulties.
Since then I have become a fully accredited member of the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and abide by their code of ethics. I have also undertaken further training in suicide intervention, adolescent psychotherapy, mindfulness based approaches, family constellations, deep listening and EMDR.
I have undertaken my initial couples counselling training with Bob and Rita Resnick (www.gatla.org). This led me on to continued training with the Couples Institute in the US using a developmental approach to approaching couples difficulties (www.couplesinstitute.com). Couples therapy differs significantly from individual therapy and I am committed to ensuring that my continuous training hours includes a focus on couples work.
I am also an accredited supervisor. I qualified from the Dublin Gestalt Centre. I specialise in supervising therapists in their work with couples.
Approach
My style of Counselling is based on the Humanistic approach. This approach draws from a number of rich theoretical frameworks such as Person Centred, Transactional Analysis, Attachment, Complex Trauma, Personality Function and Dysfunction, Gestalt and Object Relations.
Contact
Karen Murphy
Turners Cross
Cork City
Email: mail@karenmurphy.ie