Kyle Lee

How I work

Direct, warm, and not particularly precious about it

Plenty of people have had a bad experience of counselling. Usually it was fifty minutes of being asked how that made them feel, followed by a bill. If that was your experience, I understand why you are hesitant.

I work differently. I will ask direct questions. I will offer you my read on what is happening rather than sitting on it. If something you are describing sounds like a pattern I recognise, I will name it, and you are free to tell me I have it wrong. Often the most useful sessions are the ones where you do.

What I will not do is rush you. Especially with addiction and trauma, going too fast is not brave, it is just a good way to make someone stop coming.

Background

I work as an ACC counsellor with trauma and sensitive claims, which is careful, closely supervised work and has shaped how I pace everything else I do. My postgraduate study is in addictive behaviours, with a particular interest in behavioural addictions, the ones that involve no substance at all and are therefore easy for people to dismiss until they are not.

I also lecture in counselling at university level, teaching and supervising students through their clinical development. Teaching keeps you honest. It is difficult to hand-wave a technique to a room of students who will ask you why it works.

That mix is where the structured side of this practice comes from. There is a clear clinical pathway behind the work, and a twelve week programme for pornography and problematic sexual behaviour, with written client resources I have developed alongside it.

Who I work with

Individuals, couples, families and teenagers. The areas I spend most of my time in are relationship and couples work, pornography and sex addiction, and substance addiction. Alongside those, a lot of my work is with anxiety and depression, trauma, emotional regulation, and grief and loss.

Addiction and relationship difficulties are the two things people most often carry alone for years before saying anything. There is usually a lot of shame stacked on top, and most of that shame is doing nothing useful. Getting it out of your own head and into a room where nobody flinches is often the first thing that actually shifts.

What a first session is like

You do not need to prepare anything or have a tidy version of the story. We will spend most of the first session working out the shape of the problem, what you have already tried, and what you want to be different. By the end you should have a reasonable sense of whether we work well together.

If I think you would be better served by someone else, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a specialist service, I will tell you and help you find them. That happens sometimes and it is not a failure.

Ethics, supervision and privacy

As a provisional member of the New Zealand Association of Counsellors I work to the NZAC Code of Ethics and attend regular professional supervision, where I discuss my work without identifying you. This is standard practice and it is there to keep the quality of your counselling up.

What you say is confidential, with the narrow legal exceptions that apply to every counsellor in New Zealand. Those are set out plainly on the privacy page, and I will go through them with you in the first session rather than burying them in paperwork.