Walter Baxter

Face to face and online/ phone counselling are offered. I work Tuesday to Thursday. I am available for morning, and afternoon appointments. My final counselling session starts at 4.30 pm.

I assume that you are looking for a counsellor because something has gone wrong in your life and you are searching for a way to put it right. There are many different reasons people come up against seemingly unsolvable problems in their lives. But at the end of the day what really matters is finding an effective way to overcome the problem so that you can continue to live the life you choose. When our usual ways of sorting our problems out don’t work anymore it can be helpful to speak with someone who is not involved in your day to day life. I have been trained to provide you with a safe and confidential space to explore what is bothering you. By this, I mean both a physical space and an emotional space. I will not judge you but I will give you my honest reflections on what you say to me. I will work hard to understand what you are telling me and to empathise with the emotions you are feeling. The combination of adding a completely new person’s ideas to your problem-solving efforts in the unique circumstances that a counselling space offers, allows new answers come to light. I believe that the answers to problems in living are found by you creatively reshuffling your personal strengths, your life experiences, and what we have learned “between us together” and coming up with a new perspective.

The therapy that I offer is based on the belief that people who come for therapy are experts on their own lives (even if they don’t feel they are), who have lots of potentially good ideas about how to deal with their problems. One of my main roles is to help the person to make the best use of their experience and understanding.

This means that my approach to therapy (called a ‘pluralistic approach’) is to try to be as flexible as possible in responding to your needs. What I find is that different people are helped in different ways. For instance, what some people find most helpful in their therapy is to express their feelings – sadness, anger, fearfulness. Other people find it more helpful to take a rational approach to their problems, and use the therapy to ‘think things through’. People can shift, over the course of therapy, from finding one kind of activity helpful to then preferring to work in a different way with their therapist.

I try to be flexible around the practical arrangements for therapy. Most people attend for a one-hour session at the same time each week. This can vary depending on your personal circumstances.

Flexibility also applies to the number of therapy sessions that you receive. Some people come for one or two sessions, and find that this is enough to put them ‘on the right track’. Other people attend therapy for many months. What is important is to do what is best for you personally. One of the options is what I call intermittent therapy – if you have some sessions and then want to stop, you can always come back at any time in the future, and pick up where you left off.

Generally speaking, I consider the first session an initial assessment meeting. This is not formal counselling but instead, an opportunity for you tell me in more detail about what is troubling you. Together, we put together an initial plan of how we will work together. We do this by agreeing on what you would like to get out of counselling. We make a list of the things that are stopping you living the life you want to live. We also decide where you want to start exploring your problem. This list may change over time but initially, the list gives us a way to structure our work together. This initial meeting also includes me gathering information about your family relationships and day to day life. I also ask you to fill in some assessment forms that detail your feelings and mood. We also discuss the counselling contract which includes confidentiality. If at the end of our initial meeting you decide to go on to formal counselling, we will schedule our next meeting.