Individual Psychotherapy Bristol

Half-hour preliminary meeting: Both for individuals and couples, there’s no charge and no obligation.   Please contact me here to arrange one.

For individual therapy: The first session is two hours, £140-00. All subsequent sessions are one and a half hours, £105-00. The time in between is up to you, and most people choose three or four weeks.

For couples: Length of sessions is the same as for individuals. The first session is two hours, £210. Subsequent sessions are 1.5 hours, £155.

• • The time between sessions is up to you and is not meant to be weekly. Mostly people choose three or four weeks.
  • There is no commitment  to a fixed number of sessions.
  • Fees are payable before each session by bank transfer ie by phone banking. I don’t take credit cards.

For both couples and individuals, the first session is 2 hours, and the rest are 1.5 hours.

I offer a free choice of time between sessions, and mostly people choose three or four weeks. That’s subject to availability; if booking from one session to the next, I can’t guarantee the preferred time will be free. However we can work round this and ensure the preferred time by pencilling in two or three sessions ahead.

Payment is by BACS ie mobile banking, session by session, in advance of the appointment.

My office hours are:

Monday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday – closed.
Subject to availability, possible appointment hours are:

11:30-1:00 on Tuesday and Thursday (but not Wednesday)
2:30 – 4:00 on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday
4:30 – 6:00 on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday
7:00-8:30 pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

To fit in the first, 2-hour, appointment I extend these hours like this: the three daytime slots start half and hour earlier, and the evening slot ends half an hour later (ie 7:00 – 9:00 pm.)

My therapy model is a burst of sessions, rather than long term continuing. Roughly half of individual clients come for 5 – 10 sessions and roughly half of couples come for 4 – 8 sessions. You should get a sense of how things are going after the first couple of sessions. A few individuals do come for longer, some for a dozen or a few up to 20 or 24 sessions.

It goes without saying I don’t mean that all or any problems can be healed in that time. Rather, my model is to turn the corner which life is inviting you to turn in the present moment. That could be a huge or a small corner. There may or may not be other corners to turn in the future.

There’s no commitment to any fixed number of sessions. You get a free choice of time between sessions, and most people choose three or four weeks, or sometimes fortnightly just to start off with (all subject to my diary).

Prior to starting we have a half hour initial meeting. There is no charge for this and no obligation.   Please contact me here to arrange one.

My office is 7, Unity St BS1 5HH. This is the road at the bottom of Park St directly opposite College Green with a pizza place on the left hand corner and a Cafe Restore on the right hand corner. If you’re driving, the low-level exit from Trenchard St is only a couple of hundred yards away.

No. There’s no need for a specific issue. It’s enough something needs to be different.

This question sounds strange, but people ask it a lot. What they mean is do I just do “conversational” therapy which is like an ordinary conversation but deeper.

The answer is no. I use many processes and methods of enquiry.

I put this question in quotes because everyone who asks knows this is unanswerable and no therapist could  ever say Yes.  What it actually means is: How normal am I? Are my problems normal ones for therapists? Are my issues permanently crippling, or are they too trivial to deserve help, do other people cope easily with worse things? Am I weird? We live in an isolating world. It’s easy to be so alone with our hurts and fears that we’ve no way to know such things.

Statistically,  most people who come to me do have the general range of issues that everyday therapists commonly work with  and to that extent I can give that re-assurance. If something is outside my experience or training I say so.

Online sessions work, and can work very well. But I am reluctant to work only online with no face to face meetings.

If you work only online then over a period a subtle something is lost. With some clients I’ve done a long run of online sessions and then met in person, and both myself and the people involved felt more effectiveness working face to face.

I’m open to do a mixture of in-person and online, and please ask.  Even then, I find couples sessions where myself and the  two people are in three different locations do not work.  I don’t do these at all.

Yes, if you’d like to write something down you’re welcome. Just ask and I’ll give you a clipboard.

My work is certainly trauma informed, and has been so since long before the phrase gained currency. Exceedingly simplified: overwhelming shock events, or toxic continuing situations, or toxic climates in childhood cause a combination of “split-off” parts of the mind (sounds terrible but it’s normal); terror; hugely painful but fundamentally mistaken feelings that a person is shameful or unlovable; or similar feelings about the world eg You can’t trust anyone, or Only achievement matters.

Again exceedingly simplified, something these hurt and cut-off parts have in common is that they need to be approached super-gently, first building up a feeling of respect and safety. And then somehow communicating to the hurt of cut-off part that the bad times are over and the world is safe and OK. There are many ways to do this but (sometimes without emphasising them) gentle safety and communication with the unconscious mind are factors they have in common.

Your kindness does you credit but no, anyone who wants an appointment needs to contact me directly.

I don’t work with people of undergraduate age or younger. Students typically need some kind of weekly support, but my sessions are three or four weeks apart. This fits badly with the university term. In addition the transition from the small world of school to the big world of university has some specialised aspects that I have no training in.

I don’t do single sessions of this or any type of therapy, though I’ll probably do one or more constellations with most clients.

There may be deep emotions involved in over- and under-eating (not always). But it is highly unlikely that change of behaviours and weight loss/gain will result directly from feelings-based therapy such as I do. The emotional healing is real, but does not directly convert to change in eating habits.

Instead, change of habits needs a combination of nutritional change and/or ongoing support and/or CBT-mindfulness types of intervention. I have no training in this area. In addition one-hour weekly sessions are better and I don’t do those.

Of course emotions are deeply involved in eating issues, and it may be that CBT/mindfulness etc interventions are difficult or even impossible without emotional healing. I’m happy to work with the emotions, but this wouldn’t be enough on its own.

Attachment theory is good but  I use a different system of understanding which covers the same ground in a different way, and much more. This is the body-based characterology originated by Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Lowen. A good popular book is The 5 Personality Patterns by Steven Kessler . I’ve been fortunate to have trained extensively with one of the world’s most experienced experts in this approach to understanding people, Moumina Jeffs. It’s extremely useful and it’s one of the pillars of how I work.

There’s easy parking in Trenchard St multistorey. The low-level exit is only a couple of hundred yards walk from my office.

There are  bike racks in the street, and you can also bring the bike up a few steps into the downstairs lobby.