St. Paul
My name is James Foley. I am an accredited member of The Irish Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists. I have also over 20 years experience as a Psychiatric Nurse. I worked in the drug addiction area for over 11 years. Currently I have completed 2 years working with Pieta.
Personal and Professional Background
After training in marketing and advertising I went into psychiatric nurse training when I was 25. In total I spent over 20 years as a psych nurse.
While I enjoyed the interaction with the patients over time I found nursing too constraining. In 2010 I started my counselling therapy training. While combining family responsibility with counselling training I become an accredited counsellor in 2019, and set up Prevail in April 2020.
In July 2020 I was diagnosed with cancer. By Christmas that year my chemotherapy had finished.
In May 2021 I returned to work in private practice and started working with Pieta in June 2021.
I firmly believe in ongoing training and have to date completed 4 modules for a level 9 masters in counselling and psychotherapy.
In my near 30 years of professional caring work I have learned that the human heart, mind and soul can be fragile. When cared for and empowered, us humans can achieve greatness in the normality of life.
I am married and have two teenage sons.
The following are areas that I have experience, training with:
- Addiction, primarily substance abuse.
- Suicide prevention
- Bereavement, particularly in the area of suicide
- Mild psychosis and paranoia
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Phobia
- Self harming behaviour
- Relationship issues
- Low self esteem
- Serious physical illness
- Anger
In my counselling work I believe in the following guiding principles:
- Our thoughts make us. Our thoughts become our beliefs. They in turn direct our feelings, behaviours and automatic physical reactions. Negative thoughts lead to negative beliefs. These result in the problematic emotions, behaviours and physical impulses that bring us to counselling. Resolve the negative thoughts and the problem behaviours and emotions will follow.
- Relationship is king. The relationship between the counsellor and the client determines the success of the counselling. Identifying underlying negative beliefs and helping to reframe them is a very individual process for every client. This process works through the natural working relationship between the therapist and the client.
- Learn to counsel yourself. The aim of counselling is for the client to appropriately self manage their life. The client will usually leave counselling eventually. This does not mean that they will be, “cured”, of all their concerns. Hopefully it will mean they have developed skills to manage these concerns when they arise again in the future.