Melanie Godfrey

My Background

I have worked in the counselling field for twenty years and over that time have come to specialise in work with adolescents and young adults.
I have also done extensive work with adults through family and couples therapy.
I have always had a keen interest in Community Development and have during my years in counselling been involved in various upliftment projects.

My Interests

Through my work as a Counsellor I experienced a dis-connect between the children that I was counselling and reaching and working with the family to heal the whole family unit. I also experienced that many families felt overwhelmed during this process where they were often sent to various professionals in various disciplines in an effort to ‘fix’ the challenges that their child was facing at the time. To overcome this, we at Foundations for Life have formed a multi-disciplinary family centre where the family is welcomed into a safe and caring environment while the work is being done often across multiple disciplines. This way of working creates a safe place and a mutually trusting space where our professionals can collaborate and share skills, the goal being to find the best possible solution for the unique situation that that family is in. We have just registered our NPO called The Social and Emotional Learning Centre and I am excited to be starting this journey into community development in 2018.

My Services

I utilise both Solution Focused and Rogerian (Person-Centered) Therapy methods incorporating these into a major part of my work.

Through this I offer individual counselling sessions to adolescents, youths and adults. I also offer family and couples sessions to adults.

I believe in the importance of Life Skills and Academic skills development and as such I am involved in running two specific programmes for children, adolescents and youth both at schools and privately at Foundations for Life. At community level I run Social Life Skills Programmes that build and teach competencies to children to help them socialise effectively and manage everyday life challenges. I also teach a specific Study Skills Workshop that shows learners how to learn based on their own preferences and gives them the test and exam techniques so that they have that cutting edge.