Dr Alexander Fox

Dr Alexander Fox-Counselling with a reflective, literary, and philosophical approach

In-person counselling in the Dundee and St Andrews area

Online Counselling for those in London, Manchester, and across the UK

Maybe you can't quite put your finger on what's wrong. Indeed, your life may look fine from the outside, and yet something doesn't quite feel right. Maybe the old ways of understanding your life don't seem to fit anymore, and you don't know what will take their place.

This unclear felt sense of what is wrong is where our work can begin. People tend to come along to see me when their life feels confusing and uncertain, when they are facing, for example, self-doubt, anxiety, low mood, grief or a quiet, yet painful disconnection from themselves. Together, we can work to find the words for you to understand and to then change your life. This understanding isn't only intellectual, as it resonates with your experience of life.

I won't rush to provide generic solutions to your problems that may be a poor fit for you as an individual. My work is integrative/pluralistic, as I use a variety of therapy modalities (e.g. CBT, Gestalt, Psychodynamic) as different, yet complementary ways of understanding the problem. Where it helps, I draw upon my background in literature and philosophy, not as a way to intellectualise your problem, but to help validate it as part of the human condition. 

I’m Dr Alexander Fox, a counsellor with practices in Dundee and St Andrews and online across the UK. My doctorate is a PhD in English literature (a psychoanalytic study of Harold Pinter's plays) - with a second in Philosophy currently underway - and it's the source of the literary and philosophical sensibility that I bring to my work, although I only draw upon it where I think it genuinely deepens our reflection.

Why clients choose to work with me

• BACP registered counsellor with 12+ Years of Experience, which includes several years on London's Harley Street
• An experienced supervisor for 7+ years to both trainee and qualified counsellors.
• A genuinely pluralistic practice where I fit the therapy to your problem rather than the other way around
• An LGBTQ+ affirming practice
• I am co-author with colleague Dr Peter MacMillan on a series of books about Grit (i.e. how to persevere to reach your goals). Dr MacMillan is a former Hong Kong antitrust lawyer and a cognitive scientist: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09VV66GW3?binding=hardcover&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_thcv

Who I might be a good fit for

You might find my way of working helpful if you:

• You are someone who reflects deeply on your life but feels stuck emotionally
• You struggle with perfectionism, a harsh inner critic, or self-doubt
• You are drawn to a kind of therapy that values reflection, meaning, and depth
• You seek out a form of therapy that goes deeper than techniques. A kind of therapy that meets you as an individual
• Your life on paper is going well, but you inwardly feel disconnected from yourself
• You are finding it difficult to put into words what is exactly wrong, but something feels off or unresolved
• You are struggling to know how to respond constructively and authentically to the losses in your life
• You are unsure about your life direction and want to work it out without simplifying anything
• You feel anxious about the uncertainties of life, and you want a space where it can be reflected upon rather than avoided
• You believe that words matter and that finding the right ones for you can transform how you live your life
• You find it appealing seeing your life as a story that can be told and redrafted 

Working with students

Having been a student for many years myself and a tutor in several disciplines, I know the academic life inside and out. I understand the pressures of that life, such as the deadlines, being far from home, and the sense that you have to have a life direction worked out before you've had a chance to think. Much of this can be daunting to work out on your own, and there often isn't much time to think. If you feel you're just getting through your week and you want to reflect on your life more deeply, this is the work I can help with.

Working with Professionals

Many of my clients are themselves in professional or caring roles, such as therapists, academics, medics, clergy, educators, leaders or creatives. These roles come with the expectation of having to be competent at all times and there's little room to feel uncertain or conflicted. I offer a space where you don't need to be the expert. I will gently help you to explore the tensions between your professional and personal identity, so that you can avoid burnout and find meaning again in your role.

LGBTQ+ Affirming Therapy

Here there's no need to explain or defend who you are. Many people who come to see me carry the weight of feeling unseen, judged, or unsure of their place in the world but our work isn't confined to difficulty. We can give equal attention to the creativity, resilience and simple joy of living as your authentic self.

A Closing Thought

My aim working with clients is to help them understand themselves better and what they are living through. When we articulate what we are confronting, we can find better ways of responding to it.

What my Clients Say

Alex is an exceptional counsellor. I was immediately put at ease when I first met with him and, during our subsequent discussions, he was patient, friendly, flexible and insightful. I think Alex’s vast knowledge of counselling theory makes him stand out as a practitioner; the discussion of this was incredibly helpful for me in establishing a perspective from which to view my personal emotional issues. The sessions with Alex had a significant and lasting impact on my life, and I would enthusiastically recommend him as a counsellor.

My Professional Impact Beyond the Therapy Room

I have designed and delivered workshops for organizations seeking to support their team's mental wellbeing:

Dr Fox conducted a session for Lloyds Banking Group on how to deal with health anxiety in this current climate. The session was part of Mental Health Awareness Week and was conducted for over 800 of our colleagues. The coping strategies Alex outlined were extremely useful and the session as a whole was truly fantastic and thoroughly enjoyable. We were all extremely delighted with Alex's holistic approach and I would strongly recommend others to lean on Alex's expertise in this area. - Lloyds Banking Group.

The Reading Cure Podcast

I co-host The Reading Cure podcast, exploring how literature can support mental wellbeing, combining my passion for books with therapeutic insights.

Featured in Dundee University Publications

My innovative approach to mental health has been featured in Dundee University publications: Reading Cure Podcast: Exploring the Link Between Mental Wellbeing and Books: https://www.dundee.ac.uk/stories/reading-cure-podcast-exploring-link-between-mental-wellbeing-and-books.

This was an intro to who I am. Please read on for further information about: A) How effective counselling, in my opinion, works; B) Common mental health issues and how they might be addressed in therapy.

Section A: My Approach to Therapy: The Journey We'll Take Together

Therapy can sometimes seem mysterious if you haven't experienced it before. Let me demystify the process and share how I believe effective therapy works. Our work together typically encompasses three essential aspects:

Emotional support

~Who listens? First line from a Paula Fox novel.

In our busy world, finding someone who truly listens is increasingly rare. Friends and family, though well-intentioned, may be preoccupied with their own challenges, have fixed ideas about how to "fix" your problems, or find it difficult to sit with your pain.

In our sessions, whether in-person or online, you'll experience:

• A dedicated space where you are the focus, without judgment or hidden agendas
• I will be genuinely present and attentively listening so that you feel truly heard
• I will recognise and honour your unique experiences, emotions, and perspectives
• I will seek to validate your feelings, which opens pathways to deeper understanding

Clarification

When challenges feel overwhelming, we often lose touch with what is really going on. Together, we'll work on honing in on what is really going on for you:

Exploring Your Life Story: I'll help you understand how past experiences may be influencing your present reality, using my literary background to help you recognize patterns and themes in your personal narrative.

Uncovering Core Beliefs: Drawing on my philosophical training, we'll identify and examine the hidden beliefs that may be shaping your perceptions and responses.

Applying Different Therapy Modalities and Techniques: My pluralistic approach allows us to view your challenges in a variety of ways, which gives us more flexibility in how to tackle them.

Transforming Insights into Meaningful Change

Understanding alone isn't enough - therapy should lead to positive change. We'll work together to:

Reframe Challenging Situations: We will uncover new perspectives by reframing your problems by putting them in a more constructive light.

Develop Practical Strategies: We'll work out what your goals are and use techniques and strategies to help you achieve them.

Build Resilience: We'll work out what your strengths are and how you can draw upon them to tackle and cope with your problems.

Connect with Your Values: I will help you align your choices with what truly matters to you.

Cultivate Self-Compassion: I will help you learn to treat yourself with the same kindness you would offer a good friend.

Section B: Common problem areas

The previous section gave you an idea of what I consider the essential ‘ingredients’, so to speak, of effective therapy. In this section, I detail how I might tackle a variety of common problems.

a) Resolve your relationship difficulties

Since healthy relationships with others play such a huge part in our overall happiness, it is unsurprising that relationship difficulties can so adversely affect our mental health. If you are suffering from the ill effects of a problematic relationship, I will help you, as an individual, define what is needed to heal or break away. More specifically, in individual counselling, I will help you a) identify the problematic behaviour patterns, which includes often how you communicate and b) utilize a variety of strategies that allow you to connect better with your partner.

It must be stressed, though, that individual counselling examining a relationship issue should not be seen as a replacement for couples counselling.

b) Addictions/compulsions

Practically all of us are addicted to something, and nearly all of us find ourselves being driven by desires and fears that we seem to have little control over. However, some addictions and compulsions are even more serious, as they threaten our health, undermine our relationships, and challenge our sense of who we are.

There are several ways that I work with clients with addictions and compulsions. Firstly, addictions and compulsions can sometimes be viewed as habits, and we can work together to break these habitual forms of behaviour. Secondly, addictions and compulsions, as costly as they are to the person, are usually forms of escape from a dreaded emotional reality that is feared even more than the unfortunate consequences of pursuing an addiction or compulsion. Through our work together, we can face the underlying problem, resolve it, so that the addiction or compulsion is no longer needed. Finally, addictions and compulsions are symptomatic of inner conflicts, as well as outer conflicts with other people, and pinpointing and resolving these helps the client move forward.

c) Overcoming anxiety

Out of all the mental health problems, the most common by far is anxiety. Whilst not all of us will get clinically depressed, all of us get frightened, and sometimes this fear starts to feel overwhelming.

There are many effective ways that I can work with you on overcoming your anxiety. One approach, the CBT way, is to help you examine your thinking and change your unrealistic, overly protective thoughts into more realistic beliefs about yourself and the world; this cognitive approach is complemented with encouraging you to gradually face that which you fear. When you work with me, you will receive plenty of support in confronting your anxiety.

Another common technique is the psychodynamic approach, which encourages clients to see their current fears as being related to past adverse events and traumas from their childhoods. The basic reason why this can be effective is that once we become consciously aware of the original cause of the fear, and we start to understand it from the perspective of an adult, the fear no longer has the same power over us. Instead of reacting with fear, we begin to be able to more adaptively respond to a situation.

I will mention one last approach here, known as ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy). This is one of the newest cognitive therapy approaches to anxiety, which is based on the premise that we accept that anxious feelings are part of life and we learn to detach from them and move towards that which is more worthy of our attention. ACT offers many techniques that help clients detach from their anxieties (this is not the same as completely removing them) and reconnect with what they value.

d) Depression

Depression is such a common mental health problem.

Here are a few of the many ways I can help clients with their depression: a) using a CBT approach, we can examine and critique the negative automatic thoughts that often fuel your depression; b) utilizing solution-focused therapy, we can work together to start imagining life as you would want it and then I can help you to see how to build that better, happier life; c) using ACT, I can help you to detach from your negative thinking and focus more on what you want; 4) since depression often involves suppressed-‘stuck’-feelings, most often anger and sadness, I can aid you in acknowledging your previously buried feelings and to feel them so you can process them.

e) Achieve greater self-acceptance

One of the major tasks of therapy is to help clients see that they have a right to be who they are and that any weaknesses they possess need not be grounds for fundamentally rejecting who they are.

I have many innovative ways of working with you to achieve this goal from using techniques taken from compassion focused therapy (e.g. fostering better self-talk) to more philosophical approaches that come from REBT (rational emotive behavioural therapy) that counsel ways to accept yourself unconditionally. Together, we can tackle a variety of difficulties relating to self-acceptance.

f) Consolidate your successes

In my work with high-performing clients in law, finance, and the arts, a key part of the process is helping them build upon successes they have already achieved. While such clients may be very successful, they might not always be so aware of a number of things relating to that success, such as a)what kind of strengths they might have and how best to utilize them; b) the factors that played a key role in their successes, which might provide a basis for further success and c) how to overcome their personal problems to achieve more success. If this is the kind of work you wish to undertake, then we can work together to provide answers to the above issues, so that you can be even more successful, whether you’ve achieved your dream position yet or not.

g) Loss: our greatest teacher

Life is, in one sense, a series of losses. Many are small (if not always trivial) and some are most significant: whether it be the loss of a partner, a child, our youth, or the heyday of our successes, we must learn to cope with the passing of time and the absence of what is still so precious to us.

To paraphrase psychologist Carl Jung, it is in our darkest moments where the gold is to be found, as life-changing losses may often be very painful, even debilitating; nevertheless, such bereavements teach us the need to re-evaluate our lives, to get better acquainted with our underlying inner resilience, and to find a means to still have a fulfilling life.

When we work together, we can find a way of understanding your grief that respects how important whatever you lost was to you, while also helping you to move forward in a constructive fashion. A key part of this process is being able to arrive at the point that you can give yourself permission to have a future, as grief can sometimes trick us into believing that moving on is a betrayal of what you have lost. Grief work will allow you to remember and honour the past, yet not be entirely defined by it.

h) Apathy and Suicidal thoughts/gestures: finding the 'why' again

I was standing in the snow by my car, looking up at the sky, when I realized that meaning had fled my life~ Allen Wheelis from his novel, "The Seeker."

Sometimes our problem is not so much a specific issue but more a general sense of malaise. What we used to enjoy no longer moves us, we can feel disconnected and indifferent to others, and our days seem to stretch out like some infinite grey plain.

When we are at our most despairing, our painful numbness may morph into a compulsive, negative call to action. Suicidal thoughts and perhaps even attempts become a possibility.

Yet, as counterintuitive as it may seem, I contend that you do not want to end the existence of you as a person, but rather to end the pain that you are feeling. Suicide is seductive as a solution when you have equated you and your pain, and you feel that both are forever entwined.

That is not the case, though. Through the right kind of therapeutic work, you can a) manage to come to terms with your pain; b) we can work together on finding solutions to your problems, which includes reconnecting with your fundamental values and what drives you in a positive direction (this can be called finding your 'why') c) we can also work on self-forgiveness for actions that you have taken in the past that you feel guilty about. Your regrets can indeed be honoured and learnt from without them becoming something to berate yourself over.

I offer online appointments to clients based in London, Manchester, etc., using Zoom. 

Although personality typing can never capture our uniqueness, it can be one of the ways that we can come to understand ourselves. For those interested in Myers-Briggs and/or the enneagram, my type is INFJ and 4, respectively.

Please have a read of a few more client testimonials about their experience of working with me, where they emphasise the following:

• Reflective approach: I combine my philosophical and literary knowledge with my therapeutic expertise to provide insights that help clients achieve greater self-awareness and break free from limiting beliefs.
• Empathic: Clients feel safe to open up, and they feel understood. I provide warmth while offering professional guidance.
• Personalised approach: I see each client as an individual and tailor the therapy to suit them as a unique person.

Client Testimonials

"After a particularly rough time in my life, I came to Alex seeking help in better understanding the basis of my negative feelings about myself. From the first session, Alex was both inviting and insightful. His incredible knowledge of subjects ranging from literature to philosophy and media made me feel not only at ease – he was relatable and understood what I was saying to him – but also helped me to look further inside myself and to connect the dots between life events and current mindsets.

With his help, I feel I have come a long way these last few months; I have a better understanding of my own mental health, and with his advice and suggestions, I am now taking proactive steps to rectify some deep-rooted cognitive biases. Alex has listened to me and carefully considered which avenues would be beneficial to explore, based on his insight and professional opinion. He has helped me to come to terms with myself, and while I may not be 100% there, I am much closer to my goal than I was before our sessions.

For anyone searching for a warm, friendly, and empathetic therapist, I would highly recommend Alex. I have felt that all of our work together was purposeful and valuable, and I look forward to continuing to get to know both myself – and Alex – better in the future."

"Alex is an exceptionally insightful counsellor. His empathetic approach, combined with a highly rigorous intellectual foundation, helped me understand the personal issues I needed to address and the best ways for me to manage them. Without his guidance, I would not have been able to make important life decisions as sensitively nor as effectively for my own sake and for the well-being of my family. His personalised approach was key to gaining my confidence and enabling me to move forward on issues with which I had struggled for years."

"For years, I knew I had issues and finally plucked up the courage to find a counsellor. I had anxiety, feelings of guilt, and an inferiority complex. Family issues dominated my thoughts, and I felt a sense of guilt, shame, and blamed myself. Alex helped me look at these issues differently and, with his knowledge and experience, helped me break free from the past and stop feeling guilty, and I now know my own personality. I felt very at ease, was not scared to open up, he was approachable. I would definitely recommend him".

"Alex was able to work with me to identify many underlying issues that I have struggled with. I have found the process to be interesting and enjoyable. He provides a relaxed and comfortable environment in which I feel I can be open and talk frankly. Alex has helped me considerably in exploring my thoughts and introduced me to a number of techniques and exercises that I can use on a day-to-day basis to deal with anxiety as it arises."

"I’ve found Alex to be very attentive, approachable and knowledgeable. Alex has helped me work through issues in both my personal and professional life, helping me gain insights that I would not have been able to reach on my own. In addition, Alex has also equipped me with the tools that will help me deal with any future difficulties that I may encounter. I found that Alex also takes the time to get to know you so that he has a deeper understanding of you as a person, which, I think, helps him to discover what will be the best and most effective way to help you. Alex also a deep understanding of philosophy, and I’ve been impressed with how he’s managed to sometimes integrate this into my sessions, where appropriate, and make it relevant to my situation. Alex has helped me a great deal, and I’ve learnt a lot from him; I can’t recommend him highly enough.

"I've been having counselling with Alex for several months now. Initially, I wasn't sure how long I wanted to go; I had planned just to get me through my 'crisis' at the time. However, the more I went, the more relaxed I became and felt there was more I definitely wanted to work through. I find Alex very calming, honest..and most importantly for me..logical! I also didn't know how I would be with a male counsellor, but I can genuinely say I've worked through a lot of issues. My main concern is trust, or lack of, however, I already feel a difference in my thought pattern. Slowly but steadily, I'm noticing little changes in the way I'm thinking. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Alex to anyone looking for counselling"

"Alex has helped me to create strategies to help with immediate anxiety problems as well as helping me to face long-standing issues. Alex has helped me to explore many strategies in a safe, secure environment and encouraged me to seek out others in my own time. He has also helped me to vocalise my thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Alex has a way of turning my thoughts back to me to help me make my own conclusions. Through these sessions, I am learning how to manage on my own and in the sessions in a safe way. I feel I am being supported and guided through the wilderness of my own mind to some clarity. I am not constricted by a maximum (or minimum) number of sessions and am able to be supported in what I want to achieve, in whatever timescale that I need as an individual".