About John Walter, counsellor in Bude and online

I’m a counsellor in Bude, and I work online across the UK. Most of what I do is relationship work, with couples and with individuals, and I work with children and young people too. If you’re weighing up whether to get in touch, this page is here so you can get a sense of who I am and how I work, and decide whether I’m the right person before we ever speak.

How I came to this work

I came to formal counselling training in 2018 after a significant loss. But the ground had been there for decades. My work with people started in 1988 at a residential therapeutic community, where I was an educational therapist working with children in real difficulty, under the supervision of the consultant psychoanalyst Barbara Dockar-Drysdale. It was person-centred work, learned on the job, before formal qualifications were really the thing, and it shaped everything I did after. From there it ran on through child-centred teaching, foster parenting, storytelling, and running men’s groups from the nineties. That’s getting on for forty years of working closely with people, most of it before I trained formally. So when I did train, it was never a fresh start. It was where all of that came together.

How I work

I work relationally. In plain terms, that means I work with the whole web of relationships a person carries. For an adult, that’s how you are with yourself, with a partner or the significant people in your life, with family, with colleagues, and with the younger parts of yourself that still shape how you meet the world.

For a child or young person, it’s how they are with themselves, with friends and peers, with family, and with the adults who hold authority over them. We bring all of those relationships into the room, and into the relationship between us, and that’s where the work happens. Difficulty rarely sits inside one person like a fault to be corrected. It lives in these relationships, and that’s where it can change. What shifts things is being genuinely met by another person, far more than advice or technique.

“You’re the only person who actually listens to me.” A young client, some years ago.

Who I work with

I work with individuals, with couples, and with children and young people. Sessions are in person in Bude or online across the UK. I’m LGBTQ+ affirming and neurodiverse affirming, and you’re welcome here as you are.

If you already know roughly what you’re after, these say more:

• Couples and relationship counselling
• Individual counselling
• Counselling for children and young people

Training and registration

I qualified as a counsellor with a Diploma in Counselling, and I hold a Certificate in Working With Couples. I’m an accredited registrant with the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society, MNCPS (Acc). I’m now on the Advanced Diploma in Relational Psychotherapy at the NAOS Institute, and I hold student membership with COSRT. My work is supervised, and I practise within the NCPS Ethical Framework.