Andrew Brackenbury

Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday Face-to-Face (or online) at Broad Street, Stamford.

Wednesday - some online availability 

Hi, thank you for visiting. As you're here, my guess is that your life is feeling really difficult right now. I wonder if you're struggling with low self-esteem, anxiety, sadness or anger? Are you experiencing difficulty with relationships, or feeling like your life lacks a sense of purpose?

Thoughts and feelings like these are all normal parts of life, but when unexpressed and unresolved, they can cause overwhelming distress, or leave us feeling numb as we try to avoid the emotional pain.

If this sounds familiar, my friendly, supportive and non-judgemental approach to therapy offers a safe place to offload, find hope, and take steps towards a calmer, happier, more fulfilled way of being you. 

From personal experience, I know that choosing to open up and be vulnerable takes courage, so it’s my goal to help you feel as comfortable and safe as possible from the moment we first speak. 

I'll listen to you fully, to really hear how things are for you right now. No matter what your story or experience is, I’ll remain calm and will support you to learn from and regulate your own emotional responses. This helps us create a genuinely safe space where you can look closely at your life, hear your own voice clearly and consider new perspectives. 

When needed I can support our work by sharing insights from contemporary neuroscience into how the mind and body work, or by providing ideas and techniques to help you find calm and manage anxiety.   

I am a fully qualified psychotherapist/counsellor, with my core trainings being a Level 7 Post-graduate Certificate in Person Centred and Experiential Counselling & Psychotherapy and a Level 5 Diploma in Therapeutic Counselling.

I take a collaborative and flexible approach to counselling, working with each client to find a therapy that works best for them. 

My counselling room is right in the centre of Stamford,  Lincolnshire at 12 Broad Street. There are plenty of nearby car parks and I can advise on places where street-parking is usually possible. 

I also offer online and telephone therapy.

Both short- and long-term therapy is available. 

Either way, there's no commitment to a specific number of sessions, this can be an ongoing discussion between us.

The first session is a chance for us to get a sense of what it would be like to work together. From personal experience, I know this can seem an unnerving situation, so I’ll make a big effort to help you feel as welcome, comfortable and relaxed as I can.

We'll need to create framework for your therapy, so we’ll discuss and agree a contract between us. This provides a safe structure for our work together. I will then ask a few questions to make sure I have your relevant contact details and do a brief assessment to help ensure nothing important is missed in the early phase of our work together.

Once this is done, the session would become more like a regular counselling session. I would invite you to speak at greater length about what brought you here: what’s been happening for you, how you’ve been feeling and what thoughts you’ve been struggling with.

We would then consider what would be most helpful to initially work on, and if it feels appropriate I’d help you come up with some initial goals for your therapy. I refer to these as ‘soft goals’ - they’re there to give us a sense that we’re heading in a direction that’s genuinely helpful for you.

We’d then take a few minutes to discuss how the session has felt, and whether it feels right for us to start to working together. If it didn’t feel right, I would then try to help by pointing you in the right direction to find alternative support.