Specialist

Angelika -New Start Programme Facilitator

Angelika migrated from Germany in 1983. She is a counsellor, trained in many modalities including psychodrama. She is the co-leader of our New Start programme for migrant and refugee women. She also enjoys using a wide range of other creative ways such as use of colour, song and dance as well as psychodrama, to work with the women in the programme. She is a member of NZAC and works in private practice providing professional supervision, group therapy, team building and individual counselling.

Anya - Children's Counsellor

Anya's background is in design, music and business taking a turn to Psychosynthesis counselling in 1992. Since then Anya has combined her skills as a counsellor with her creative expression through Post Graduate training in Expressive Therapy at AUT. She has also spent several years studying ways of healing the affects of trauma, and has certificates in Dissociation, Post Natal Depression and the Therapeutic Value of Sound.

Anya has worked in private practice as well as Community Mental Health, and more recently, her role counselling children with Home and Family Society. Anya's multi-faceted training gives her unique approach to her work with children, adults and groups. In her professional capacity Anya has memberships with both the New Zealand Association of Counsellors and the Creative Therapy Association Auckland.

Anya's approach to life is to take everyday experiences and embrace them with all her heart. She believes if we allow ourselves to learn from our challenges and pain as well as our joys and delights, we enhance the meaning we make of ourselves. She is committed to counselling as a means of achieving this for herself and others, serving to promote the celebration of life.

Weekly - Wednesday and Friday

Jude - Children's Counsellor

Jude works at Home and Family as a Specialist Child and Adolescent Therapist /Counsellor. Originally training as a Registered Nurse, Jude became increasingly interested in the emotional welfare and safety of children and completed her Graduate Diploma in Child Mental Health in 2001 at AUT, followed by a Master of Health Science Degree in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy. She is a member of NZACAP and currently handles child and adolescent therapy/counselling at Home and Family Society.

Jude works with mothers and babies, children and adolescents and parents. She enjoys using a range of creative techniques with her clients in the form of play therapy, art, and sand tray work. Jude approaches her work with children and families with sensitivity, understanding, respect and compassion.

Weekly - Tuesday all day, Thursday afternoon and Saturday mornings.

Joanna - Women's Refuge Counsellor

Joanna Kingsbury has worked for Home and Family as a counsellor in women's refuge since 1998. Originally trained as a nurse, Joanna became increasingly interested in the psychological aspects of health, and retrained in counselling, starting off as a Lifeline counsellor and trainer before enrolling in the counsellor education programme at Auckland University. Joanna graduated with her Masters degree in Education (counselling) with honours in 1999. Currently, Joanna divides her working week between counselling for Home and Family at an Auckland women's refuge, working as a Family Support Worker for the Child Cancer Foundation, and a small private counselling practice.

Women who come to refuge often have physical injuries, each certainly has emotional injuries, and many have children with them who have witnessed the violence or abuse that has taken place in their home and therefore are abused themselves.

Jo sees women of all ages from teenagers through to older women. Home and Family offers each woman staying at the refuge a free weekly counselling session and three additional sessions once they have left the refuge. "This continued supportive care is very important."

Estelle - New Start Programme Facilitator

Estelle is a psychologist and psychodramatist whose work with Home and Family involves leading a group for women refugees and immigrants focusing on trauma healing and other issues using action methods, as well as others.

Over several decades, Estelle has developed a focus on working with trauma. She was one of the original counsellors with the Sexual Abuse Help Foundation and still works in private practice with survivors of abuse; female and male. She also does groupwork with a co-leader and a team, subsidised by the Accident Compensation Corporation.

Working with trauma also involves experiencing transformation, and this side of her work she finds deeply satisfying. It is also reflected in her love of many creative forms of expression including sand-tray work, clay, body casting, music and environment. Estelle was married for many years and is mother to three adult children and grandmother to five. She has been in a committed lesbian relationship for some time.