Hi! I’m Simon, and I offer person-centered, open-ended, private and confidential counselling to adults.

Most people find me friendly and easy to talk to – which is good, because counselling gives the best results if you and the counsellor can establish a working relationship based on trust and confidence.

People generally find that they can work with me on their difficulties, and my approach with clients is that although I am the counsellor, you are the expert on what works for you. I don’t live your life, and I don’t know better than you! This means that I don’t tell you what you should do, but between us we try to discover what’s gone wrong, how it is affecting you now, and to find a way forward that will work best for you in the future.

Person-centered counselling is not like medicine, because there’s no standard treatment, and no magic pill, either. There is no formula for how long it might take, because everybody is unique. Some clients have a single issue and stick to that. Some clients arrive thinking that they will talk about one problem, and it turns out that they have other things that they had forgotten about, or were feeling too ashamed to talk about at the start of our work together. 

The reason that I practice Person-Centered counselling is that, for most clients, it gets good results – and the reason that I offer open-ended counselling is that, for many clients, the four or six sessions available from overstretched NHS services is insufficient to deal with their issues as they are struggling to manage their feelings. Whatever the reason for coming for counselling, they feel reassured that they do not have to try to squeeze all the issues that they wish to work on into a small number of appointments.

Often, the thing that clients bring to talk about is a consequence of something else, and this means that it can take a little while for the underlying cause to come to light. Anger is a great example because nobody is “just angry” – people are only angry as a result of something. This can be because of abusive treatment as a child, bullying at home or at work, or for a million other reasons. Once we have dealt with what’s behind the anger or rage, it stops. That’s why I don’t believe in or offer Anger Management – because for most people it’s just like putting a bigger lid on the pressure cooker. My approach is to turn off the gas under it.

Counselling with me allows you to say the unsayable, or think the unthinkable, about you, and the people you love – or hate. I will encourage you to just be You in our sessions, to say what you want, how you want, and not to be worried about what I might think. I’m unlikely to be shocked. Still, there’s always a chance…