Welcome!
My name’s Esther Walker and I’m a Gestalt counsellor working from offices near Haymarket in Edinburgh. I offer face-to-face and online sessions in a collaborative process that aims to resolve distress by supporting your vitality (aliveness in body/mind) and personal resource (knowledge, understanding, skills).
I work with 3 complementary approaches:
- Gestalt counselling resolves patterns of experience (thought, belief, behaviour, movement) that echo the past and cause problems in the present
- Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) releases somatic memories (related to trauma or attachment disruption) which your body remembers but which are outside your conscious awareness
- Systemic (or Family) Constellations (SC) uncovers hidden loyalties and connections to your family of origin that shape your experience of the world (both positively and negatively)
For further information on these, please scroll down.
On the ‘Approach‘ page there’s information about what to expect if you work with me.
And on ‘About Me’ page you can find more about my training, CPD and support.
Gestalt Counselling
Gestalt offers a practical approach to exploring and resolving difficult feelings and situations. We’ll pay attention to your physical experience (as well as what you think and say) and help you to try things out so that you learn by doing. In this way, you’ll benefit from:
- greater self-awareness
- new understanding of how relationships work and of your own experience of relationships
- greater flexibility in how you approach and respond to the world
- greater access to feelings of satisfaction, hope, contentment, excitement, warmth and love (and acceptance of feelings of anger, envy, loss…)
At the outset we’ll agree what outcomes you’re looking for so we have a way of judging progress.
Deep Brain Reorienting
Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) is a relatively new approach in the treatment of trauma. It was developed by Scottish psychiatrist Frank Corrigan, to help clients integrate unresolved experiences that shocked the nervous system.
Repeated shocks sensitise the midbrain (where our fight/flight/freeze response is located) so that relatively small triggers then create states of panic/hyperarousal. DBR works with the midbrain, releasing the shock response so that the emotions connected to the traumatic experience can be expressed and processed.
Systemic (or Family) Constellations
While DBR attends to the internal systems of the body (in particular the Nervous System), Systemic Constellations (SC) attends to the external system/s that our Nervous System adapts to.
We’re born into a family (whatever form that takes) that has survived traumatic events and experiences over generations (e.g war, death, abandonment, poverty) by hardening, bending, twisting to protect against the pain that may destroy it. We experience those contortions through the hands, eyes, voice, expressions of our carers. In this way we learn at an embodied, unconscious level the rule book for survival: “don’t cry” “put others needs before your own” “be the best”.
Of course most of what’s in the rule book is neither acknowledged nor made explicit…yet we know it by heart…at a cellular level. In order to bring movement to current problems, we need a way of including the wider system, and identifying the implicit rules that bind us. SC does that by creating a moment – a constellation – using everyday objects, to help understand what blocks energy flow and what can restore movement.
Where I work
My work room is on Coates Place, a 5 minute walk from Haymarket Station, and on main bus routes into and out of the city.
It’s in the basement and, unfortunately, has no wheelchair access. There are steps up to the main door of the building and then two short flights down to me. If you have any concerns about access then please ask me/let me know.
There are bicycle racks on Atholl Crescent (just off Shandwick Place), and on West Maitland Street. Car parking is tricky during the day but gets easier in the evening.
Address: Suite 7, 3 Coates Place, Edinburgh EH3 7AA
Lively Body Mind 