If people search for “therapy” and end up here, that’s fine – counselling is very often exactly what they’re looking for. The two words get used interchangeably, and there’s a reasonable case for that. What I offer is counselling, and I’m a counsellor rather than a psychotherapist, but the work itself – the sitting down, the talking, the making sense of things together – is what most people have in mind when they picture either.

What they probably don’t have in mind is the reality. Which is considerably more ordinary than the films suggest.

What the first session actually involves

Mostly: talking. You don’t need to know what’s wrong, or have it organised into a clear narrative, or say anything in the right order. Most people arrive with something between a vague sense that things aren’t right and a more specific difficulty they’ve been putting off dealing with. Both are fine starting points.

The first session is really just the two of you working out whether it feels like a useful fit – whether you can talk to each other, whether the approach makes sense for what you’re dealing with. There’s no performance involved. You’re not being assessed, you are being seen and heard without judgement.

What sessions are like after that

Variable, honestly. Some sessions leave you with something to think about for a week. Some feel more like maintenance – touching base, keeping the thread. Some are harder than you expected. Some are lighter. You might cry. You might not. You might, on occasion, laugh – because life is frequently absurd and good counselling doesn’t require you to pretend it isn’t.

The through-line is having somewhere to put the things you’ve been carrying around without quite knowing where to set them down. Someone who will listen without an agenda, who isn’t going to be frightened by what you say, and who isn’t going to need reassuring that you’re okay.

The bit that surprises people most

Almost everyone who comes says, at some point, that they weren’t sure they’d have anything to say. And almost everyone finds they do.

The other thing people often say is that they wish they’d done it sooner. Not because counselling is some transformative miracle – it’s not, it’s just steady useful work – but because the simple act of not having to carry something alone turns out to be more of a relief than they’d expected.

No chaise longue. Just two chairs and a box of tissues you may or may not need.

If you’d like to find out whether this might be useful for you, drop me a message