Fiona Barlow

I currently have limited availability on Fridays, working face-to-face and online. 

Sometimes life will feel challenging, which can leave us feeling unanchored, threatening our sense of who we are. This can lead to a variety of feelings including fear, frustration, anger, sadness, distress or confusion and feeling stuck.

I offer a non-judgemental and confidential space to explore some of these feelings. Allowing yourself the opportunity to reflect can offer new perspectives, which can help you to understand yourself better.

This knowledge can be very powerful in helping to shift away from patterns or behaviours that may be causing you difficulty. This can enable you to process and make sense of your experiences and life circumstances, which can help you to live in a more fulfilling way. 

A key element of my approach is the therapeutic relationship we build together, working to create a feeling of trust and safety which enables you to feel heard and seen. My approach is non-directive and allows you to speak openly about whatever is coming up for you, at your own pace.  

My core training is in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. This draws on the understanding that our early life experiences and relationships have a profound impact on how we develop and who we are as adults, often in ways that we may not be aware of. Through reflection and exploration, Psychodynamic counselling and therapy can enable you to become more aware of the different ways in which your early experiences might be showing up in the here and now; in how you feel about yourself and how you relate to others. This process can bring insight about the origins of some of these feelings or patterns and help you navigate them with more clarity and self-awareness, leading to increased contentment.

While Psychodynamic therapy is my core approach, through my professional experience and on-going training and CPD, I have experience of other approaches and techniques, including behavioural activation techniques, compassion-focused therapy, grounding and breath work, and I may draw on these if they feel beneficial to our work together.  I offer both short term and long-term therapy. 

Finding the right person to work with is hugely important to the therapeutic process. I offer a free 15-minute, no-obligation phone call which helps me to learn more about your reasons for coming to counselling, and gives us the opportunity to identify if I might be the right fit for you. 

Our first full session will be more structured than a typical session,  with me asking questions about your life so far, any key areas you would like to explore in therapy and what your expectations are.  Subsequent sessions will be much more free-flowing, relational and we will work with whatever may be coming up for you at that time.