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

Counselling is a collaboration, in which we explore your feelings, values, choices, and assumptions, how you experience yourself and how you relate to others. Considering alternative perspectives and exploring our behaviours and experiences in collaboration with another person allows us to reconnect with who we really are and create the conditions for growth.

We each have our own unique story including our family, social and cultural context. 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. Within us, we have the capacity to find answers to the things that challenge us; to develop the insight we need to make the right choices.

Committing to counselling is a big step for anyone. My role is to support you in addressing the issues that brought you to counselling. To do this, I attend to your way of being in the world, your experience. The conditions need to be right. For counselling to help, it must be possible for people to share things that are deeply sensitive to them. If you are not comfortable to share, then there can be no progress. For that reason, it’s important that you define the direction and pace of the work. Our work is led by your needs.

I am committed to providing a safe, supportive, and non-judgmental environment for these conversations. Trust is key to allowing a respectful exploration of your lived experience. Exploration can be uncomfortable but it is by questioning what we think we know about ourselves that insight emerges about our internal processes and narratives. 

I hope the above gives  a sense of how I work and am happy to discuss further

Psychotherapeutic Counselling is a talking therapy, intended to help people bring about change and enhance wellbeing. It involves regular (usually weekly) sessions of 50 minutes 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Attachment theory sees our way of being in the world (sometimes called an internal working model”) 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.