Josh is an Integrative psychotherapist and counsellor. This means he is not restricted to working in one particular way. He is creative and will adapt the way he works with you to suit your individual needs. He works short and long term in an holistic way, from a humanistic and relational perspective. He offers a safe, confidential, non-judgmental, space for you to pause and reflect on your reasons for choosing to enter therapy, whilst working collaboratively with you towards your hopes for your future self.

Josh believes that no healing can truly begin until you are able to offer and accept compassion to and from yourself. So his work with you will start from a place of kindness, respecting that you are coping in the best way you can under difficult circumstances. He will offer you the time and space you need to sensitively explore your embodied feelings and thoughts about your presenting issues. This collaborative process might help you to gain new skills, perspectives and form fresh insights that facilitate alternative ways of thinking and feeling thus being in the world.

Josh works with a wide range of individuals and their challenges but has a particular interest in: abuse, anxiety, bereavement, bullying, depression, LGBTQIA+ individuals and their issues, life limiting health conditions such as cancer and HIV/AIDS, neurodiversity and trauma.

In her early 30s, Sarah realised that she didn’t want to carry her feelings of sadness (which she didn’t understand) around with her any longer and needed help.  That was the beginning of her therapy journey in which she learnt the impact of events in her past, patterns she was maintaining and the reasons behind them.  Nobody forced her or even suggested it, she realised that she needed it and submitted to the fact that she had struggled enough on her own and needed the help and support of someone else.

Years, and lots of therapy, later she became frustrated that she couldn’t offer others who were struggling the same life changing therapy that she had benefited from.  That was the start of a new direction in her life.

 In 2013 Sarah graduated as a psychotherapist  from York St John University.  She specialised in working with traumatised people.  She is also qualified to supervisor and has experience of supervising therapists of all different therapeutic backgrounds and people who are not therapists but frontline workers.

 Sarah would describe herself as a humanistic integrative.  What that means is, she believes that you have within you the wisdom and resources to heal and to resolve psychological distress.  She respects diagnoses and can understand the group of symptoms they explain but the diagnosis is not her main concern, she wants to meet the person behind the diagnosis and her will use the skills that she has fine-tuned over the years to help you to unravel, evaluate and integrate your own way forward.  She sees herself as an equal partner in the process and maintains that you are the expert on what you think and feel.  She brings to the relationship her skills that have been refined over many years.

Trauma seems to be a buzzword these days and so it is important to clarify what is meant.  A medical diagnosis of trauma relies on certain symptoms.  Sarah has a broader approach to trauma.  She agrees with Gabor Maté who suggests that the world we live in currently is at odds with human need and so we all bare some sense of trauma.  Some people go through life never perceiving  the need to address this trauma, others will feel it acutely at times or will develop patterns to avoid it. Perhaps you have recurrent thoughts of past events, people, places that just get stuck in your mind or that you find yourself being reminded of and thinking about when you don’t mean to, maybe it is an emotional response that keeps emerging and seems out of control.  These could be addressed in a trauma informed way.

Sarah has been privileged to work alongside a body therapist and to see how effective addressing the ‘somatisation’, bodily symptoms, of trauma is.  She is studying body therapy and will offer treatments in 2024.  In the meantime she has incorporated more recognition of the bodily impact into her therapeutic work.

Qualifications RGN PgDip

Memberships BACP

Sarah works with adults and offers in person, online and group sessions, as well as therapist supervision.

Price per session: £70 for appointments before 4pm / £80 for appointments after 4pm.

Supervision

It is my belief and experience that good supervision serves as a safe place where we can evaluate our practice on many levels. Learning through reflection, we evaluate our practice through our emotional responses to our client work.  We, together, monitor and develop professional standards.  We address areas where we feel stuck with clients or confused or uncomfortable with aspects of our client work.  The work of therapy requires that we fully engage with the client on an emotional level and in supervision we can monitor the level of engagement, it’s impact and any blank spots that emerge where, for some reason, we might be struggling to respond empathically.

Just as the relationship between the client and therapist is essential, the relationship with your supervisor is key to effective supervision.  Therefore, I pay attention to what might be happening in the supervisory relationship and how that might impact the effectiveness of the supervision.  At the heart of all supervision is the welfare of your clients and the effectiveness of your work with them.  Because of this I used the 7 eyed approach to supervision which looks at seven focus areas, each with the client in mind.  I find this model works across different models of therapy without conflict.

My therapeutic approach is humanistic integrative. I was first trained in the Person-Centred approach and so the core conditions are fundamental to all of my practice.  I integrate other humanistic principles and practices.  I am currently studying bio dynamic cranio-sacral therapy and so incorporate body awareness and pay attention to bodily experiencing as part of a holistic approach.  I initially did my post graduate diploma in counselling and psychotherapy at York St John and then my post graduate certificate in supervision at the Leeds Centre for Psychological Development.

Price per session: £60