Journal
Notes from the other chair.
Occasional writing on anxiety, low mood, relationships, and what therapy is actually like from the inside. No advice-column tidiness.
Most of what gets written about therapy is either clinical enough to be useless or breezy enough to be insulting. These notes try for the middle: what actually happens in a room in Kew, in plain words, from someone who sits in it every week.
Expect pieces on what a first session is really like and why the fear of it is usually worse than the thing itself; on anxiety that has stopped being occasional; on the flatness people describe as “I should be happy, and I’m not”; on relationships where the same argument keeps arriving in different clothes; and on drinking, using and the other habits people manage privately for years before mentioning them out loud.
None of it is a substitute for talking to someone. If something here lands close to home, that is usually worth a conversation rather than more reading — the free 15-minute call exists for exactly that, and it costs nothing either way.
What actually happens in a first counselling session
The honest version: what the first fifty minutes involve, what you do and don't have to say, and how you'll know whether to come back.
11 August 2026 · 2 min read