If you’ve found your way to this page, you’re probably weighing up whether counselling is worth it, and whether I’m the right person to do it with. So here’s how I work, and how the practice is laid out, to help you find the part of it that fits.
A lot of people expect counselling to mean being assessed and handed techniques to take away and practise, a problem named and a fix applied. That isn’t how I work. I work relationally. In plain terms, that means I pay attention to what happens between people, in the room with me and in your life outside it, rather than treating a difficulty as a fault inside one person to be corrected. Most of what brings people here lives in relationship: with a partner, with family, with the people around you, and with yourself. That’s where difficulty settles, and it’s where it can change.
So the work isn’t advice, and it isn’t a set of exercises. It’s close attention, paid together, at a pace that suits you. What changes things is being properly met by another person, more than any technique, whether you come on your own, as a couple, or you’re a parent bringing a child who’s finding things hard.
Couples and relationships
With a couple, the work is with the relationship itself, the thing that lives between you, as much as with either of you on your own. Roommate distance, the same argument on a loop, the drift after a big change, the aftermath of a breach of trust: these are patterns two people get caught in, not the fault of one. We slow them down and come to understand them together.
Couples and relationship counselling
Individuals
On your own, the work is much the same, turned inward: how you are with yourself and with the people who matter to you, and what happens between us in the room. I hold a particular interest in men’s mental health, and how men are so often shaped to handle everything alone. Social anxiety, low spells, the sense of standing at a distance from your own life: all of it is relational, not something to be managed away.
Children and young people
With children and young people, I work at their pace, through talk or play as fits their age, and always alongside the adults around them. Usually it’s a parent or carer who gets in touch: a child who’s gone quiet, who’s refusing school, who’s unsettled after a loss or a change. This work is in person, in Bude and North Cornwall.
Counselling for children and young people
In person in Bude, or online
Sessions with adults and couples happen in person in Bude, or online across the UK, whichever suits you. Work with children and young people is in person only. If you’re not sure which fits your situation, that’s one of the things a first phone call is for.
Not sure if it’s right for you? Let’s talk first.
The best way to find out whether we’re a good fit is with a free phone call. No cost, no pressure, just a chance to tell me what’s going on and ask anything you want before you decide. If it feels right, we book a first session from there.