What I work with
A fuller account of what people come to counselling with, and what I can and can’t be useful for.
If you would rather start with the limits, what I’m not the right person for is further down this page.
Most people arrive with something they could name if asked, and something underneath it they couldn’t. Both are welcome, and there’s no need to have worked out which is which before we talk.
What follows is an honest account rather than a list of things I claim to fix. Some of it will fit you closely, some not at all, and quite a few people find their situation isn’t described here and it turns out there’s still plenty to work with. If you’re not sure whether what you’re carrying belongs on this page, that’s a good enough reason to get in touch and ask.
The short version
People most often come to me with:
- grief, bereavement and other endings
- anxiety
- stress and burnout
- depression and low mood
- difficulty in relationships and family life
- low self-esteem and perfectionism
- redundancy and changes at work
That isn’t a menu, and it isn’t everything. Counselling isn’t a treatment applied to a category, so the list is only a rough guide to whether we might be a fit. The rest of this page is the fuller account.
What people bring
These are the shapes those things tend to take, grouped by how they arrive rather than by any formal category.
Loss and endings
People come after a death, and also after the endings that don’t get the same recognition: a marriage, a job, a role, a version of the future they’d been counting on. Grief rarely keeps to the timetable people expect of it, and a good deal of what gets brought here is the private worry that it’s taking too long, or arriving in the wrong shape, or not arriving at all. The hour is somewhere to set it down for a while without also having to manage anyone else’s reaction to it.
What changes, for a lot of people, isn’t the size of the loss. It’s that grief stops looking like something that has gone wrong with them. It tends to arrive feeling like an intruder, and a good deal of effort goes into managing it or waiting it out. What often becomes clear instead is that it is proportionate, the measure of what mattered, and once that lands it no longer has to be fought. The feeling isn’t smaller. But the fight going out of it frees up more than people expect.
Anxiety
Not all anxiety comes of having too much resting on you. Sometimes it has no obvious object at all: a dread on waking, a body braced for something it can’t name, a run of thinking that keeps arriving at the worst version of things. People often describe two problems rather than one. There is the anxiety, and then there is what has been done to keep it at bay: the plans made and unmade, the invitation declined, the small avoidances that each seemed sensible on the day and have quietly narrowed the week. Many people who bring this have also privately concluded that it is ridiculous, which tends to make it harder to say out loud.
Two things tend to loosen. The first is the shame, which often goes before the anxiety does. Describing the whole of it to someone who doesn’t find it absurd takes away a job you may not have noticed you were doing. The second is that the dread stops having to be an emergency. Anxiety that can be felt without having to be stopped takes up less room, and the things that had dropped out of the week tend to come back before anyone has set about reclaiming them. It isn’t that the feeling gets dispatched. It’s that life stops being organised around not having it.
The weight of holding things together
Some people arrive tired in a way that sleep doesn’t touch. Often they hold a good deal for other people, at home or at work or both, and there’s little room left over to notice what it’s costing. Stress and burnout usually turn up here, and so does the particular kind of anxiety that comes of too much depending on you. Often the first thing said out loud is simply how long it has been going on.
Anxiety of that kind usually presents itself as an enemy: something alien that has moved in and needs getting rid of. What tends to emerge is that it is doing a recognisable job, and mostly a protective one, watching for danger and keeping you ahead of something. People who reach that point often describe the tiredness lifting before the feeling itself has changed much at all, because they are no longer at war with a part of themselves.
How you see yourself
A lot of people carry a running commentary about themselves that they would never use about anyone else. It can look like never quite feeling enough, or like a standard that keeps moving just out of reach so that nothing finished ever counts. Low self-esteem and perfectionism are the usual names for it. What tends to get brought here is less the commentary itself than how tiring it has become to live alongside.
That commentary was learned somewhere, and for many people it was once useful: spotting the fault first was safer than being caught out. What tends to change here isn’t that it falls silent. It’s that it stops being the only voice in the room, and stops being taken as the verdict. People begin to be able to tell whether something was good enough by their own reckoning rather than by checking, which is a slower change than it sounds and a more durable one. The standard that kept moving stops moving quite so far.
Relationships and family
Difficulty with a partner, a parent, an adult child, a sibling, someone at work. Sometimes it’s one relationship that has become hard to be in, and sometimes it’s a pattern that keeps turning up with different people. I see individuals rather than couples, so this would be your account of it and what you’d like to be different, rather than a conversation with the other person in the room.
Because the other person isn’t here, what changes is rarely them. It’s usually that your own part in it comes into focus, along with what you actually want from it, which is often less obvious than it seems from inside. Some people find a conversation they had been avoiding becomes possible. Others find that what shifts is the wanting: they stop trying to make a relationship into something it isn’t, and get some of that effort back. Both count, and which one it turns out to be isn’t mine to decide in advance.
When several things arrive at once
There’s a stretch of life, usually somewhere from the forties onwards, when things stop arriving one at a time. Parents need looking after, or die. Children leave, or don’t. A career that once felt like a direction starts to look like a place you’ve ended up in. Bodies change. Friends get ill. And underneath it, often for the first time in years, a quiet question about whether this is how you meant to be spending your life.
Any one of those would be enough on its own. What tends to get described here is the accumulation: not one difficulty but several, overlapping, none of them getting proper attention because the next one is already arriving. Depression often turns up in the middle of that and gets put down to circumstance. The hour isn’t a way of sorting them into order. It’s somewhere to look at the whole of it with another person, and that’s often when it becomes possible to tell which part is actually pressing.
That sorting is worth more than it sounds. When everything is urgent nothing gets acted on, and a great deal of the strain comes from the standing effort of holding several things at once without being able to put any of them down. What people describe is not that the load reduces, at least not at first, but that it becomes possible to attend to one thing properly. And the quiet question underneath, whether this is how you meant to be spending your life, usually turns out to be the one that has been waiting longest for a hearing. It doesn’t get answered here. It does get asked properly, which is generally where any answering starts.
Who I work with
I work with adults of any age, one to one.
Sessions happen in person, on foot in Richmond Park for those it suits, and online. The walking therapy page sets out what walking asks of you before you decide, and the fees and practicalities page has the where and when.
If you’re autistic or have ADHD
Some of the people I work with are autistic, or have ADHD, or both. Mostly they’ve said so early on, and mostly it has mattered less to what we talked about than to how we talked about it.
I don’t offer assessment or diagnosis, and I wouldn’t describe myself as a specialist. What I try to do is not make you translate yourself into an hour that was built for somebody else. So I’d want to get some things right early: what pace suits you, how much I should say out loud rather than leave implied, whether silence helps or hinders, what the room or the screen needs to be like. I’d rather ask than assume, and I’d rather you told me I’d got something wrong than quietly adapted around me.
On words: some people say autistic, some say on the spectrum, some say something else again, and the same goes for ADHD. I’ll use whatever you use, and I’ll ask rather than choose for you.
If any of that matters to you, it’s worth saying in the first conversation. It won’t be treated as a complication.
How I work with it
I don’t work from a single method. My training is in pluralistic person-centred counselling, with earlier training in Gestalt.
Pluralistic is a clumsy word for a simple idea: no one approach suits everyone, so what we do here is agreed between us and kept under review, rather than settled before we’ve met. It makes the direction yours more often than mine.
Some of what people bring has its roots in things that were frightening or overwhelming at the time. I work in a trauma-informed way, which is less a technique than a set of habits: going at your pace rather than mine, checking rather than assuming, and treating your own sense of what’s safe to look at as the reliable guide. Nothing has to be told before you want to tell it, and some things never need telling at all.
What I’m not the right person for
What’s above is what I work with, and it’s meant as a description rather than a gate. But there are things I’m not trained or supervised to hold, and it would be worse for you to find that out three sessions in than to read it now.
That isn’t only my own judgement. The BACP Ethical Framework I work under requires me to practise within the limits of my training and competence, and to notice when something falls outside them.
I’d rather not print a long list of everything I can’t do. It would be a dispiriting read and it still wouldn’t be complete. The clearest cases are anything needing medical or specialist treatment, anything needing assessment or diagnosis, and anything where someone needs urgent help rather than a weekly hour.
Three more, since vagueness here helps nobody. I see individuals, so if what you want is to be in the room together with a partner or a family member, that is couples or family work and I don’t do it. I’m not the person for a court report, a workplace assessment or anything else where the writing-up is the point. And if you are looking for someone who will tell you what to do, we would both find it frustrating, because I mostly won’t.
Beyond that, please just ask. If you’re not sure whether what you’re carrying is something I can work with, say so when we speak and I’ll tell you straight.
If what you need is something I can’t offer, I’ll say so early and help you find someone who can. That isn’t a polite way of turning you away. It’s the part of this job I take most seriously.
If you’re not sure
Plenty of people aren’t. If you’ve read this and still can’t tell whether I’m the right person, that is exactly what the first conversation is for.
The first conversation is free. About twenty minutes, no obligation, and nothing is booked or paid for until after we’ve spoken.
Arrange a free first conversation
If you’re in crisis or need urgent help, counselling isn’t the fastest route. You can call the Samaritans free on 116 123 at any time, or contact your GP or NHS 111.