Hello, I'm Rachel

 

Life might be feeling really challenging for you right now. You might be experiencing self doubt, a feeling of stuckness, or of life not being what you had hoped. Or any number of feelings that don’t feel ‘right’.

Maybe you are trying to manage or avoid them through sabotaging behaviours, relationships, substances or work, for example. Or maybe you’re noticing that the same patterns, relationships and conflicts keep popping up in your life time and again, and you want to change this.

Maybe you simply want to find out more about yourself and the inner mechanisms causing you to respond to life in the way that you do.

Therapy can help with all of this.

How to start

We’ll organise a time to meet, either online or in person, for a 50 minute introductory session. If we go forwards together, this is charged as our first session. If we don’t, there is no charge for it.

This session is for you to tell me what has brought you to counselling and what you hope to gain from it, and for me to describe how I work and lay out what our working agreement will be. It gives me a broad-strokes picture of you, and your life, and will give us a sense of each other, and whether we feel compatible for each other.

It’s important that we feel we ‘click’, since therapy can be a difficult process. It won’t always feel positive or easy, but my intention is to build a relationship that feels safe enough for you to bring whatever is being problematic for you. The quality of our relationship is what enables us to look at these problems together, with compassion, acceptance, and without judgement.

I work in Bristol on Mondays and Tuesdays, online on Wednesdays and in Bath on Thursdays.

Sessions cost £60, and are 50 minutes at the same time every week.

At times I have a number of concessionary spaces available. If tight finances are prohibiting you from starting therapy, please let me know if your initial contact. If I have space to offer a lower fee session we can discuss it in our first meeting.

Email me. I always try to respond within 48 hours.

Get in touch.

My counselling approach

My belief and experience is that everybody has a deeply interesting life worth gently, respectfully unpacking and examining. In doing this, therapy can facilitate your natural drive towards healing and growth, through recognising your own autonomy and innate value.

I offer ‘talking therapy’. So in the session you and I will be sitting and doing just that, and sometimes there might be quiet. Within that there is scope for enormous creativity and bodily awareness.

My aim is to never meet you with my own agenda, but rather hold the space for whatever you want to bring. I’m interested in helping you to meet the roots of your experiences, rather than only offering you present-tense solutions.

I understand our bodies to hold emotional memory and experience, and so might ask you at times what sensations or feelings you might be experiencing in the moment, curious about what they might tell us.

The unconscious mind, which is usually running the show, fascinates me, and I welcome it into the sessions whether through bodily sensations, dreams, psychedelic, numinous or taboo experiences, or gut feelings.

As a result of my own time and work in therapy, which has been several years, I feel able to bring a non-defensive awareness of myself to our sessions this helps me to be present and honest with you and help us to build a more open, and trusting relationship.

‘Only by getting in touch with your body, by connecting viscerally with yourself, can you regain a sense of who you are...’

Bessel van der Kolk