Silja Baer

Silja provides short and long-term counselling for individuals and their family/ whanau; ACC sensitive claims counselling; supervision.

Areas of Special Interest

Silja has experience helping people from all walks of life and with a wide range of problems. Silja is therefore able to draw from a wide spectrum of knowledge and skills to best support you in a way that feels comfortable and effective to you.

Counselling Services

Silja firmly believes the purpose of counselling is to support increased wellbeing, whether this is about finding different ways to deal with current difficulties or past trauma or to further improve our lives even when things are going well.

Counselling can be tailored to your needs in regard to what you would like to see changed in your life; how we work together and how often we are going to meet. Counselling can support you with only a few sessions to find different strategies to deal with specific issues so that they are no longer forming a problem for you. Depending on what the problem is more longer term counselling may be required to address long lasting and deeper problems/ trauma.

Whatever your needs are, I am happy to offer my support to you and your journey towards your wished for life.

Counselling Approach

Silja strives to provide you with a safe space in which you can talk confidentially and will be listened to with understanding and empathy instead of judgement.

In her work Silja considers herself as being a guest in another person’s life and culture. She therefore always tries to learn more about the environments, customs and values of the people she meets and then tailor her work to the individual needs and circumstances.

Though Silja works mainly from strength-based, collaborative and narrative therapy approaches, she also draws from other therapy models like CBT; trauma focused CBT; Motivational Interviewing, Systemic Family Therapy; Tihei-Wa Mauri Ora; Te Whare Tapa Wha; Transactional Analysis; Appreciative Inquiry.

Background and Experience

Silja has been working as a counsellor & social worker since 1999 in The Netherlands & in New Zealand. Silja now works full time in private practice.

Working in a wide variety of health and social sectors allowed Silja to gather skills, knowledge and experience in the areas of anger management; family therapy; health and disability issues; parenting; child protection; problem gambling and other addictions; relationships; age related problems; abuse, specifically sexual abuse; asylum seeker & refugee issues.

Silja has found that her diverse work experience, together with her studies and ongoing professional development, enables her to transfer her knowledge and experience to successfully assist people with challenging problems.

Supervision Services

Silja is passionate about supervision and with her wide range of experience is able to provide supervision to counsellors and other health professionals. She firmly believes that there is always more to learn and that the people we work with deserve best practice and ongoing development.

Additionally, Silja believes that professionals deserve to receive support in their practice and the often challenging situations they are faced with. Allowing time to reflect in supervision on both professional practice and on personal wellbeing can be beneficial to professionals, clients and organisations.

In supervision Silja offers a safe, judgement free, space to allow professionals to discuss any questions or concerns they may have relating to their work. Working from a strength-based framework Silja supports in supervision the reflection on practice, identifying strengths and how they can be utilised more; facilitating the consideration of different aspects of situations or observed behaviours and potential alternative ways to respond.

Ethical practice is important, and supervision is a good space to reflect on ethics and to seek guidance and support around potential challenging ethical queries, especially concerning at risk situations.