Anna Bentley

I offer Face-to-Face sessions in my garden office in SW18 or online via Zoom. I am currently fully booked and not taking on any new clients. I will next review this in January 2025.

I provide a calm, non-judgemental, safe environment for you to explore your current concerns and help you move forward in your life. It can be challenging to ask for help and be honest about what you are finding difficult. But by working at your pace, with kindness and compassion, I hope I can help you understand yourself better (your thoughts, feelings and behaviours) and find new ways of coping.

I am a fully qualified Integrative Counsellor and a registered member of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (MBACP). I am also a registered Nutritional Therapist (mBANT), yoga teacher and mindfulness practitioner and my approach to health and wellness is holistic, taking in to consideration all aspects of a person: mental, physical, emotional and spiritual.

I have experience of working short-term as an NHS counsellor (6-12 sessions per client) and long-term, offering open-ended therapy to private clients. I have worked with clients on a variety of issues, including anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, relationship concerns, disordered eating, bereavement and stress. 

Being an integrative counsellor means I can integrate different ways of working, depending on your needs. These include: person-centred, psychodynamic, gestalt, transactional analysis and solution-focused. But the foundation of our therapy sessions, however they unfold, will be the relationship between us. By cultivating a warm, safe, trusting environment in the therapy room, I hope you will find it easier to explore what is going on for you. By helping you increase your awareness of your thoughts, feelings and behaviours, where they may have come from and how they are affecting you in the present, I hope to support you to explore new ways of thinking about and managing life’s challenges.

Our initial contact will be a short phone conversation (15-30 minutes) for us to have a chat about what it is that is bringing you to seek therapy and whether I am the best person to help you. If we agree to go ahead I will book you in for your first 50 minute session and I will email you my counselling agreement for you to have a look at in advance.

During your first full 50-minute session we will explore in more detail what is bringing you to therapy and I will answer any questions you may have about the process or about the counselling agreement which we will both sign. We will decide together whether short-term or open-ended therapy would seem most appropriate, always with the possibility of reviewing this as we go, and we will agree to meet at the same time and same day each week.