If it matters to you, it matters here
People ask whether their reason is a big enough reason. It almost always is. Below is the range of things I work with, grouped so you can find yourself in it, though plenty of people arrive able to say only that something is not right.
All of it is one to one. My psychotherapeutic counselling is calm, compassionate and non-judgemental, and it is yours alone.
Anxiety, stress and low mood
Worry that hums along underneath everything, or arrives all at once and takes the day with it. Weeks that feel flat and effortful, where the things that used to help have stopped helping. Work that has quietly grown to fill your whole life. We slow it down, look at what is feeding it, and find out what actually gives you some room.
When the mind gets stuck in a loop
Thoughts that keep circling back, checks and routines that started as reassurance and became a job of their own, or a fear that has narrowed what you are willing to do. It can be exhausting, and it is more common than people imagine. There is no need to justify any of it to me.
Grief and loss
Grief keeps its own time. It can arrive years late, or turn up in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, and it is not only for people who have died: health, homes, marriages and futures are all lost too. You do not have to be over it, or be getting on with it, to bring it here.
Trauma, and what was done to you
Some things stay in the body long after they are over. If you were hurt, frightened, controlled or made small, the effects can show up years later in ways that seem to make no sense. We go at your pace, always, and you decide what gets spoken about and when.
Relationships and family life
The same arguments on a loop, a closeness that has thinned out, or a family rearranged by separation. My work is one to one, so it is your side of all this that we look at: what you carry, what keeps repeating, and what you want to be different. I have a particular interest in the upheavals nobody warns you about. Becoming a parent, becoming a grandparent, and the long tail of a divorce.
Who you are, and what shaped you
Questions about identity rarely arrive tidily. They come with family, culture, faith, a late diagnosis, a body that is changing, or the plain sense that the life you are living is not quite yours. This is good ground for therapy, and it does not need a crisis to be worth exploring.
When coping has taken a difficult shape
People find ways to survive things, and those ways are not always kind to them. Whatever you have leaned on to get through, you will not be judged for it here. We can look at what it does for you before we talk about anything changing.
Where I have spent the most time
Every counsellor has areas they know especially well. These are mine, built from years of working inside education before I trained at the Northern Guild in Newcastle. I support one person at a time through each of them.
New parents & grandparents
One of my specialisms: support through the joys and upheavals that a new arrival brings to a family, working with you as an individual.
Divorce & family tensions
Calm support when family life is strained, separating, or being rebuilt into something new.
People working in education
After many years working within education alongside teachers, parents and children, schools are familiar ground for me.
You don’t have to fit a category
The list above comes from my professional profile, and it is a list, which means it is tidier than real life ever is.
Some people come with one clear thing. Others come because something has been off for a while and they cannot name it yet. Both are welcome, and the second is more common than you might think.
If you are not sure whether I am the right person, the easiest way to find out is to ask. A free 15-minute phone call costs nothing, commits you to nothing, and you will not need to explain your history to me on it. I make those calls on Monday to Wednesday evenings, between 7pm and 9pm.
I see adults, older adults and young people over 16, one to one, in my practice room at Chapter House in North Shields on Saturdays. Sessions are 50 minutes and cost £60.
Saturday appointments at 10:30am, 12:00pm, 2:00pm, 3:30pm, 5:00pm, 6:30pm.
As listed on my professional profile. How the sessions work and what they cost