Hello, I’m Alison
I’m a psychotherapeutic counsellor. On Saturdays you’ll find me in my practice room at Chapter House in North Shields, where people arrive carrying all sorts: grief, worry, old hurts, a life that suddenly looks unfamiliar.
Whatever brings you, you can expect the same three things from me: calm, compassion, and no judgement at all.
“My approach is calm, compassionate and non-judgemental.”
From school corridors to the practice room
Before I was a counsellor, I spent many years working in education. Day in, day out, I sat alongside teachers under pressure, parents trying their best, and children working out who they were, often all three at once, around the same small table.
What stayed with me from those years wasn’t the paperwork or the policies. It was how much people carry quietly, and how much begins to shift when someone truly listens, without rushing in to fix or to judge.
So I trained. I qualified at the Northern Guild for Psychotherapy and Counselling in Newcastle, an accredited training provider right here in the North East, and the place where the transactional analysis that still runs through my work took root. Moving from school corridors to my own practice room felt less like a change of career and more like a homecoming: the listening had always been the part that mattered most.
Today I’m a Registered Member MBACP. Those letters stand for Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, and the BACP is the UK’s professional body for counsellors: it sets the ethical framework I work within, expects continuing development and clinical supervision, and keeps a public register you can look me up on. The Northern Guild is accredited by that same body, which matters to me. My training and my membership hold each other to the same standard.
These days I bring both lives into the room: a counsellor’s calm and an educator’s long, practical experience of real families under real pressure.
Calm, compassionate, non-judgemental
You know your life better than anyone. I know something about how minds and bodies respond to what life does to them. Therapy, as I practise it, is putting those two kinds of knowledge side by side and getting curious together about patterns, feelings, and the things that keep happening. Mutual curiosity is the phrase I come back to most.
I’m an integrative therapist, which simply means I don’t press one method onto everyone. Depending on what helps, we might trace where a pattern first began, look at the roles you fall into with the people around you, bring in creative ways of working when words won’t quite reach, or slow right down and notice what your body is holding.
My work is one to one, so it will only ever be the two of us. I don’t see couples, families or groups. Much of what we talk about may well be about other people, a marriage, a new grandchild, a family that has rearranged itself, and what we work with is your experience of all of it.
We review how it’s going openly and often. The work stays yours, always.
Sessions can include talk therapy, somatic work, creative interventions and psychoeducation.
Quiet work, held to a high standard
Psychotherapeutic counselling asks a lot of trust. These are the professional commitments that sit underneath every session.
I appear on the public register of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, the UK's professional body for counsellors. It is a mark of professional standards, continuing development and accountability, and anyone can look me up.
Everything I do is guided by the BACP's Ethical Framework: strict confidentiality, clear boundaries, and your wellbeing placed firmly at the centre of the work.
Like every responsible therapist, I take my work to regular supervision with an experienced colleague, so the support you receive is itself well supported.
Saturdays at Chapter House
Every session happens in my practice room in North Shields, on a Saturday, with the last appointment of the day finishing at 7:20pm.
Chapter House
My practice room is inside Chapter House, a quiet private practice on Preston Road in North Shields.
An accessible room is available at Chapter House. Do mention any access needs when you book and I’ll make sure we’re in the right room for you.
Ground I know well
I work with a wide range of difficulties, and there are a few places where my own path gives the work an extra depth of understanding. All of it as individual work, with you.
New parents & grandparents
A new baby redraws every relationship in a family, not just the obvious one. I work with new parents, and with new grandparents, while they find their feet and their sense of themselves in a family that has quietly rearranged itself.
Family tensions & divorce
When a family is straining or separating, everyone in it is grieving something. I work with one person at a time through divorce, estrangement and the long-running tensions that never quite get spoken.
Education professionals
I spent years inside schools, so I understand the particular weight that teachers and school staff carry. You won't need to explain the context before we can begin. We can start with you.
The full list of what we can work with, from anxiety and bereavement to menopause, neurodiversity and more, is on the services page.
When you’re ready, we’ll start gently
A free 15-minute phone call is all the first step asks of you: a chance to hear my voice, ask your questions and see how it feels. I keep those calls for Monday to Wednesday evenings, between 7pm and 9pm. No obligation, ever.
Or simply ring me on 07355 371467