Anna Howarth
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This professional is accepting new clients but may have a waitlist. Please enquire with them directly to discuss availability.
This professional is accepting new clients but may have a waitlist. Please enquire with them directly to discuss availability.
About me
Welcome! I’m Anna.
You may be struggling with:
- Racing thoughts and overwhelming sensations in your body that draw your attention inwards
- Worry about the future often characterised by ‘what if’…
- A sense of doom washing over you - especially first thing in the morning
- Self-doubt that’s getting in the way of your goals
- Replaying past situations over in your mind that feel confusing and take you away from the present moment
- Detachment from yourself and/or your surroundings - something just don’t feel quite right, but it’s difficult to describe to others
- Fear you may lose control or experience an urge to run away/escape the situation.
- An inability to enjoy the things you used to do; instead you scan for threats and avoid people or situations that may trigger your anxiety.
These are very normal symptoms of anxiety. You are not weird. You are not crazy. Your brain isn’t broken; anxiety is just really loud.
If these symptoms describe you, I can help. I specialise in anxiety, worry, rumination, and anxiety disorders. I am a dual qualified Psychotherapist and Coach, with post-graduate training in Psychology. I offer compassionate, science-based therapy for anxiety that's grounded in warmth, curiosity and lived experience. I uniquely blend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy through a Trauma-Informed framework and Neuro-affirming lens, incorporating Psychodynamic and Somatic Psychotherapy.
Anxiety doesn’t discriminate, and most of us will experience it at some point in our lives.
Together, we can work through this; anxiety recovery can look like this:
- You feel hopeful, maybe for the first time in a long time
- You have a deeper understanding of yourself and your anxiety
- You have self-belief and confidence that you are enough
- Anxiety exists but it bothers you so much less, it’s just not as important as it used to be
- You have far more compassion for yourself
- The worry that is solvable, you work through, the worry you can’t, you let go
- Intrusive thoughts become unimportant, they just don’t carry the weight they used to, you notice them, but you know they are not you
- You start enjoying things again, not just the things that you used to enjoy, but maybe new things too
- You can turn up as you are, you may still feel triggered, you may still feel some anxiety, but it doesn’t destabilise you like it used to
- You believe in yourself again, you feel good about yourself
- You can finally rest, genuine rest!
It might be that you haven’t made sense of what or how you are feeling or haven’t identified it as anxiety. You might just know that things feel really hard and overwhelming. Or maybe, you’re at the other end of the spectrum, you know you have anxiety, you’ve tried the breathing, the journaling, the reframing your negative thoughts and even therapy, but anxiety continues to show up and you find yourself stuck; spending time intellectualising your emotions and struggling to move forward.
Wherever you are in your journey, you need therapy that works...
My Therapeutic Approach includes:
Our Foundation:
Therapy doesn’t work if you don’t feel safe and seen. This is why the foundational layer of our time together will focus on humanistic therapeutic approaches to create a sense of warmth, understanding, trust, and safety.
Your Context:
You are unique, and therapy is ineffective if you are not understood. We look at you, your background, your current context, internalised expectations, your wiring, your values, belief system and cultural expectations. We explore your experiences of anxiety and understand what may be behind the immediate challenges anxiety presents, identify how anxiety is impacting you and the thoughts feelings and behaviours that are no longer serving you.
The Intervention(s):
We tailor an approach for you. Based on the evidence-based, gold standard therapeutic approaches that I use. This will be framed within a trauma-informed lens and a neuro-affirming model so that we feed in your background, current challenges and wiring (see trauma-informed and neuro-affirming sections below for more detail). We will introduce interventions to change your relationship with anxiety, recover from the impact anxiety has had on you, re-strengthen yourself and your capacity for life and relationships.
The Reinforcement:
This is the work. Therapy with me isn’t about surface-level advice, simply talking things through or pretending that there’s a quick fix to this. It’s possible that you will feel better, and then worse again - it takes time and needs reinforcement. I know this from my own experience.
I’m not here to mismanage your expectations; to imply the recovery is linear, but I am here to say that things can get so much better. I know this from my own experience.
You don't have to figure things out alone, and you don't need to have all the answers; we can work it out together. Through this process, you will be able to find a way forward.
My ambition for you
Everyone, including you, deserves to feel OK (even if you don’t believe it yet). I want to show you that you can feel better than you do now. To feel more comfortable and connected with yourself and others around you and have space again for things that bring you joy.
My goal is to help you reduce the distress of anxiety, step out of the constant thinking patterns, stop getting pulled into every thought your brain throws at you, alleviate the pit of doom in your stomach, and bring anxiety down from a full body alarm to something that feels more like background noise. In time you’ll be able to return to yourself, your life, your relationships, your values, and everything anxiety has taken away from you. My ambition is for you to leave feeling like yourself again, able to fully engage in the world, and feel more resilient to future challenges that may come your way.
False promises don’t exist here, just the work from someone who’s been there too.
My practice is/offers:
Trauma-Informed - Some of us face long-term anxiety due to difficult childhood experiences or the burden of past challenges.
Neuro-affirming therapy that adapts to how you're wired - I am particularly passionate about supporting neurodivergent clients especially as neurodivergent people are far more likely to experience anxiety.
1:1 Nature Therapy - In its most simple form, nature therapy it is the combination of gentle physical movement with sensory immersion in a natural environment.
1:1 Yoga Psychotherapy - Practicing yoga within therapeutic environments can allow us to better understand ourselves, and our patterns.
Training, qualifications & experience
Training, Qualifications, and Professional registrations:
- BACP Registered Member: MBACP (Registered Member 421879)
- Level 7 PGDip Psychotherapeutic Counselling (Distinction) - Staffordshire University
- Post-Graduate qualification in Psychology (PGDip) - Northumbria University
- BSc Sociology - University of Bath
- Coaching Diploma - Animas Coaching
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
- Exposure and Response Therapy for OCD and Anxiety Disorders
- Somatic Therapy
- Yoga Teacher Training 200 hours - Rise Academy
- Yin Teacher Training 50 hours - Rise Academy
- (Currently completing MSc in Psychotherapeutic Counselling)
Experience and Background: I retrained as a Psychotherapist after over a decade’s experience working in a wide range of frontline services, including adult mental health, homelessness, domestic abuse, and substance misuse - gradually moving from support work to senior management. I have always been very curious about people, understanding why we are the way we are the way we are – the biological, psychological and sociological influence on our thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
But retraining as a Psychotherapist has been for personal as well as professional reasons; I have spent many years battling anxiety myself, eventually recovering, I naturally became fascinated with the recovery process. Everything that I now include in my offer have been the cornerstones of my own recovery.
Member organisations
BACP is one of the UK’s leading professional bodies for counselling and psychotherapy with around 60,000 members. The Association has several different categories of membership, including Student Member, Individual Member, Registered Member MBACP, Registered Accredited Member MBACP (Accred) and Senior Registered Accredited Member MBACP (Snr Acccred). Registered and accredited members are listed on the BACP Register, which shows that they have demonstrated BACP’s recommended standards for training, proficiency and ethical practice. The BACP Register was the first register of psychological therapists to be accredited by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA). Accredited and senior accredited membership are voluntary categories for members who choose to undertake a rigorous application and assessment process to demonstrate additional standards around practice, training and supervision. Individual members will have completed an appropriate counselling or psychotherapy course and started to practise, but they won’t appear on the BACP Register until they've demonstrated that they meet the standards for registration. Student members are still in the process of completing their training. All members are bound by the BACP Ethical Framework and a Professional Conduct Procedure.
Accredited register membership
The Accredited Register Scheme was set up in 2013 by the Department of Health (DoH) as a way to recognise organisations that hold voluntary registers which meet certain standards. These standards are set by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA).
This therapist has indicated that they belong to an Accredited Register.
Areas of counselling I deal with
Therapies offered
Fees
£75.00 per session
Free initial telephone session
Concessions offered for
Additional information
The therapy fee I have set reflects my experience and qualifications as well as my commitment to high-standard, evidence-based care and support bounded by ethical accountability. The fee includes regular, high-level clinical supervision, and my continuous professional development. I hold dedicated space each week to ensure my practice is aligned with current psychotherapeutic research to keep your support relevant, safe and targeted.
Further information
I offer Psychotherapy for adults in the UK online, via telephone, in person, and in nature.
Availability
Monday 9am-5pm (Online/Telephone)
Thursday 4:30pm-8pm (In-Person Therapy slots)
Friday 9am-1pm (In-Nature Therapy slots)
Sunday 5pm-8pm (Online/Telephone)
Free discovery/introductory call
Whether you are interested in Therapy with me, Nature therapy, Yoga Psychotherapy, or any of the other practices I provide. I offer a free, no obligation 15-minute consultation via telephone or video, or an extended consultation for a reduced fee. In this consultation we will 1) explore the difficulties you are experiencing, 2) give some space to any questions you have for me. Therapy is most effective when you find the right therapist for you, this is an opportunity for us both to explore whether working together is the right next step.
You can use my website booking system to book in your introduction call.
Your first session
Following your complimentary introductory call, if you would like to work together, we’ll book in an initial assessment session. In this session:
- I will ask you a number of questions to better understand how anxiety/other difficulties are impacting you and how they developed.
- We will explore what you want the focus of your therapy to be, what you want to get out of therapy.
- We will formulate a bespoke plan to decide on why of my therapeutic approaches feel most appropriate for you.
There is no pressure to share everything immediately; we will work at a pace that feels comfortable for you.
