Brendan Barnes

I have availabilities on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon/early evening for face to face work work (in the Farringdon/Barbican area of Central London). I also work online

I offer face-to-face counselling in Central London (Farringdon/Barbican area), including both short-term (6-12 sessions) and longer-term counselling. In long-term work, the number of sessions is open-ended but with regular check-ins to ensure that the work remains relevant to your needs. I also provide online counselling.

Entering counselling is a chance to explore your feelings, values, choices, and assumptions, how you see yourself and how you relate to others. Exploring our experiences in collaboration with another person helps us to reconnect with who we really are and create the conditions for growth, change and self-acceptance

We each have our own unique story, including our family, social and cultural background. Each of us has learned to adapt to the world we found ourselves in. Sometimes it works, sometimes we get stuck and the way we have lived our lives in the past no longer feels right. We have the capacity to find answers to the things that challenge us and to develop the insight we need to make the right choices.

I am committed to providing a safe, supportive, and non-judgmental environment for these conversations. It鈥檚 important that you define the direction and pace of the work. The work is led by your needs.

I also recognize that, alongside space for reflection, sometimes, what my clients need is very practical support, guidance and education.

There are many different types of talking therapy. I鈥檓 an integrative counsellor. An integrative approach means that resources from different areas of psychotherapy can be drawn on depending on your needs. I鈥檇 be happy to explain more about my approach.

I hope that this information is useful and look forward to speaking to you.

Psychotherapeutic Counselling is a talking therapy, intended to help people bring about change and enhance wellbeing. It involves regular (usually weekly) sessions of 50鈥痬inutes and can be used to help people with a range of emotional and psychological problems of varying degrees of severity. The duration of therapy may be left open-ended or there may be a defined time limit. Both duration and goals are agreed at the outset as part of the contracting process between therapist and client.

My approach is based on my integrative training, which means that I draw on resources from different schools of psychotherapy. This can be helpful given the different backgrounds and preferred ways of working that clients bring to counselling. I seek to be genuine, supportive and authentic in my relationships with clients. Within the range of psychotherapies that exist, my approach is based on the humanistic tradition, with a strong influence from existential and attachment theory.

鈥� Humanistic approaches to counselling emphasise the quality of the relationship between counsellor and client and are underpinned by a belief in the human desire to grow and self-heal.

鈥� Existentialism focuses on the meaning that we attach to our lives and our responsibility to make the right choices in order to live meaningful lives in the face of anxiety and uncertainty.

鈥� Attachment theory sees our way of being in the world (sometimes called an internal working model鈥�) as having its roots in experiences in early life.

In terms of background, I studied Psychology at University (1977-80). Following graduation, I worked in the private sector initially in London and, for the last 20 years, in Brussels. In 2016, I commenced training as an Integrative Counsellor . My own experience with counselling led me to a conviction about its contribution to enabling us to understand and accept ourselves as we are.

In our first session we will discuss what is going on for you and how counselling/therapy might help. I do not charge for this session, as I believe that it is important that we both have a chance to see if we could work together successfully.