Welcome

My Approach

How I Work

Life can be hard to handle - tough and confusing at any age or stage.

As a humanistic and person-centred counsellor, with a special interest in trauma, I believe passionately that the right counselling relationship can help us work through our own unique challenges and difficulties, whatever those are and whatever our circumstances, to find our true potential.

Relationships and events, success and failure, change, gain and loss can turn our lives upside down at any given moment, moving us through life stages but disrupting our “normal,” destabilising us and impacting our physical and mental health and general wellbeing.

And when we don’t actively choose what happens to us, as in for example Abuse, Accident, Addiction, Bereavement, Breakdown, Conflict, Deprivation, Illness, Marital Problems, Money Worries, Personality Disorders, Prejudice, Redundancy, Relocating, Our Sexuality, it can be doubly hard to adjust and adapt in our crisis - to find a way through trauma and grief to personal growth and development.

The way we live doesn’t always make time or allow space for processing hurts, turbulence, transitions and rites of passage, let alone for relating our past or present ‘stories’ and narratives to our future; but a single or a series of counselling sessions in a safe, accepting and non-judgemental space in which you build complete trust with an independent therapist, can provide both.

By attuning closely to how you recount and feel about your experiencing, I will help you really listen to and hear yourself; we will work together to examine, recognise, interpret and help you come to terms with highly personal emotions and habits, default responses and reactions, behaviour drivers and patterns, even your values, beliefs and conditioning.

New Perspectives

Qualifications

Experience

Contact Me

No feeling is too small to make a difference in this process of becoming more self-aware and more in control as you discover how to reframe and reshape your lived experience to get insight and new perspectives - to become more compassionate and accepting towards yourself. You may come to realise how the coping strategies you use because they feel the best and safest, could actually be holding you back, choosing to let them go and replacing them with something that works much better for you going forward - as an agent in your own life, rather than a victim.

Diploma (Level 5), Humanistic Counselling - Chichester University
Fully registered member of the British Association of Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP) - I abide by their Ethical Framework which includes doing Continuous Professional Development
NCFE (Level 1-3) Counselling Skills & Theory - Guildford College
'Awareness in Bereavement' Course - Cruse Bereavement Support
MA (Ord), French - St Andrews University

Continuous Professional Development with BACP & Cruse:

Trauma Awareness
Bereavement by Suicide
Suicide Awareness
Working With Bereavement & Complex Grief
Group Facilitators' Elective
Safeguarding
Telephone and Online Counselling

Over five years' extensive experience counselling clients (aged 18+) - Cruse Bereavement Support
Counselling Team for pre & post-bereavement clients - Macmillan Cancer Support, Midhurst, West Sussex
Counselling support at The Fountain Centre, St Luke’s Cancer Centre - Royal Surrey NHS Hospital, Guildford
The Lightning Process™ - training seminar graduate
Auxiliary nursing (geriatrics and paediatrics)
SSAFA (Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen Families’ Association) Caseworker
Business background in publishing, marketing & public relations

Whatever is challenging you right now in your life, do please start the journey here. Email me at theholtpractice@gmail.com with any queries and questions, and for a free 30-minute exploratory session. I work in-person, online and by phone, from an easily-accessible base in Haslemere, Surrey. Our working relationship will be short, medium or long-term depending on your personal make-up; it will always include regular reviews of what you feel you need and what progress you feel you are making.

My sessions run for 50 minutes at a fee of £60 per session. I'm happy to discuss concessionary rates.

I look forward to talking to you.