Helen Hayes

I offer counselling, psychotherapy, and supervision, both in person and online.

I am an experienced counsellor and psychotherapist with expertise in working with people with a wide range of difficulties, including depression, anxiety, relationship problems, sexual issues, abuse, domestic violence, bereavement, low self-esteem, work problems, stress, trauma.

I am a BACP Registered and Senior Accredited counsellor and UKCP Registered Psychotherapist. I have worked as a counsellor since 1994, in the voluntary sector, in primary care, and in a university student counselling service, as well as in private practice. I therefore have considerable experience of working with people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, addressing a wide range of emotional difficulties and life dilemmas, in both short-term and longer-term settings.

Whether you feel overwhelmed by the challenges of your present life, troubled by painful past experiences, or unsure of your future direction, you might find it helpful to talk things through in confidence with someone outside your normal circle of friends or family. I aim to offer you a supportive and non-judgemental relationship in which you can explore whatever is troubling you in life, express your feelings and thoughts, and come to a clearer understanding of yourself.

I have specialist experience in working with women affected by domestic violence, sexual abuse and violence, including childhood abuse and trauma.

Existential Psychotherapy

My main training, and the heart of how I work, is in existential psychotherapy.  This means that I draw on philosophy as well as psychology to inform how I understand the sorts of concerns that might lead someone to seek therapy.  I believe that we are each seeking to make our lives meaningful in our own personal way, to understand our difficulties, and to find our way to living as fully and freely as we are able to do.  We are never isolated individuals, but always living in the context of our personal relationships, our social and cultural environments, and our own values and aspirations.

As human beings, we often hold ourselves back from achieving our potential, or find ourselves in difficulties in our close relationships, or struggle to find a sense of purpose in our lives.  Therapy can help in unravelling some of the knots that we have tied for ourselves.

Therapy is concerned with exploring and clarifying your choices, values, or meanings, and addressing how you deal with the inevitable challenges of life. It aims to help you understand yourself, how you might repeat patterns of behaviour or relationship which are limiting or destructive, and how you might make different choices for yourself in the future.

Often the origins of our difficulties lie in childhood and family experiences which have affected us as adults; therapy can be really helpful in enabling us to understand these influences and to overcome the ways in which they might limit us.   Sometimes these experiences are very painful, and we need to be gentle and careful in how we explore them.  I have trained in Trauma Therapy and bring a trauma-informed approach to my work.  

I initially trained as a Gestalt counsellor, an approach to counselling which shares many ideas with existential therapy, and sometimes includes creative ways of exploring them in therapy.