COUNSELLING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
Who we are
Place to Talk Therapies is made up of independent, registered counsellors, each bringing their own training, specialisms and ways of working, held together by a shared approach and shared standards. Every counsellor working under the Place to Talk Therapies name is BACP registered, insured, DBS-checked, and in regular clinical supervision.
This practice was built on a simple belief: that people don't need to be fixed, they need to be met. Most of what brings someone to therapy, anxiety, trauma, shame, disconnection, burnout, grief, isn't evidence of something broken. It's evidence of something that happened, and hasn't yet had the space to be understood.
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What we mean by shame-aware
Shame is different from guilt. Guilt says "I did something wrong." Shame says "I am something wrong." A lot of what people carry into our sessions isn't really about the event itself, it's about the shame that attached itself afterwards: the sense of having failed, of being too much or not enough, of needing to hide the parts of yourself that feel hardest to look at.
Working with shame means going slowly, and it means honouring what's been protected by staying hidden, rather than rushing to expose it. Nothing is pulled out of you before you're ready. Trust builds first, and the work follows the trust, not the other way round.
What we mean by trauma-informed
Trauma-informed practice isn't a technique, it's a stance. It means we assume that difficult behaviour, big reactions, or a struggle to trust often make complete sense in the context of what someone has lived through. It means safety comes before insight, because a nervous system that doesn't feel safe can't do the work of understanding itself.
In practice, this looks like checking in on pace, never assuming what you're ready to talk about, and treating your own sense of "too much, too soon" as information, not as something to push past.
What we mean by neuroaffirming
A neuroaffirming approach starts from the position that neurodivergent ways of thinking, feeling, and relating are differences, not deficits. We don't work to make anyone more "typical." We work to help you understand your own mind on its own terms, including where masking, sensory overwhelm, or years of being told you're "too sensitive" or "too much" have made that harder to do.
How we work
Our approach is relational and evidence-informed. Relational means the relationship between you and your counsellor is not incidental to the work, it's often where the work actually happens. Evidence-informed means we draw on established approaches, including CBT, EMDR, and integrative, attachment-based ways of working, and apply them flexibly, shaped around you rather than a fixed programme.
Sessions usually run weekly or fortnightly and last 60 minutes, though we can be flexible where that's needed. There's no set number of sessions. Some people come for a few months to work through something specific. Others stay longer, working through patterns that go back further. Both are valid reasons to be here.
Getting started
If any of this resonates, the next step is simple: get in touch, and we'll arrange a short introductory call to talk it through, no obligation, no pressure to have the right words ready.
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