Brendan Barnes

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Accepting new clients
Accepting new clients

This professional is available for new clients.

location_on London, Greater London, EC2Y
Accepting new clients
Accepting new clients

This professional is available for new clients.

About me

Online and Face-to-Face Sessions

I offer face-to-face counselling in Central London (Farringdon/Barbican area), including both short-term (6-12 sessions) and longer-term counselling. In long-term work, the number of sessions is open-ended but with regular check-ins to ensure that the work remains relevant to your needs. I also provide online counselling. 

Counselling is a collaboration, in which we explore your feelings, values, choices, and assumptions, how you experience yourself and how you relate to others. Considering alternative perspectives and exploring our experiences in collaboration with another person allows us to reconnect with who we really are and create the conditions for growth.

We each have our own unique story including our family, social and cultural context. Each of us has learned to adapt to the world we found ourselves in. Sometimes it works, sometimes we get stuck and the way we have lived our lives in the past no longer feels right. Within us, we have the capacity to find answers to the things that challenge us; to develop the insight we need to make the right choices. 

Committing to counselling is a big step for anyone. My role is to support you in addressing the issues that brought you to counselling. To do this, I attend to your way of being in the world, your experience.

Your comfort is important. For counselling to help, it must be possible for people to share things that are deeply sensitive to them. If you are not comfortable to share, then there can be no progress. 

To support that, I am committed to providing a safe, supportive, and non-judgmental environment for these conversations. Trust is key to allowing a respectful exploration of your lived experience. Exploration can be uncomfortable but it is by questioning what we think we know about ourselves that insight emerges about our internal processes and narratives. For these reasons, it’s important that you define the direction and pace of the work. Our work is led by your needs. 

 I also recognize that, alongside space for reflection, sometimes what my clients need is very practical support, guidance and education. 

There are many different types of talking therapy. I’m an integrative counsellor. An integrative approach means that resources from different areas of psychotherapy can be drawn on depending on your needs. Within the wide range of psychotherapies that exist, my own approach is based on the humanistic tradition, with a strong influence from existential and attachment theory. I’d be happy to explain more about my approach.

I hope that this information is useful. and wish you well on your journey.

Please refer to the Further Information Section for more information about my work.

Training, qualifications & experience

BA (Psychology)

Diploma in Counselling (Minster Centre)

In terms of training, I’m an integrative counsellor. An integrative approach means that resources from different areas of psychotherapy can be drawn on depending on your needs. This can be helpful given the different backgrounds and preferred ways of working that people bring to counselling. Within the wide range of psychotherapies that exist, my own approach is based on the humanistic tradition, with a strong influence from existential and attachment theory. Since qualification, I have continued  a self-directed programme of continuing professional development, looking at the following areas:

·         Trauma

·         Shame

·         Attachment

·         The impact of my identity in working with clients from different identities in terms of race or gender

·         The dialogic process

Member organisations

BACP
British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP)

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

British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy
Accredited Register Scheme

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.

British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy

Areas of counselling I deal with

Therapies offered

Fees

Free initial online session

Health Insurance/EAP

  • check_circle Health Assured

Additional information

my standard rate is £70 per session but I am open to provide concessions where affordability is an issue

When I work

Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
Morning
Afternoon
Evening
Night

I offer face-to-face counselling in the Barbican/Farringdon area of London on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon and early evening. I also offer online counselling

Further information

Psychotherapeutic Counselling is a talking therapy, intended to help people bring about change and enhance wellbeing. It involves regular (usually weekly) sessions of 50 minutes and can be used to help people with a range of emotional and psychological problems of varying degrees of severity. These include depression, anger, anxiety, stress, negative thoughts, and low self-esteem.

I am bound by the BACP ethical framework and all work is confidential. The duration of therapy may be left open-ended or there may be a defined time limit. Both duration and goals are agreed between us at the outset as part of the contracting process.

I offer counselling online and face-to-face or a mixture of the two. We will discuss and agree the format of our sessions together. For face-to-face work, I am based in Central London, in the Farringdon/Barbican area. For online sessions, I use Zoom, with Facetime and Whatsapp as fallbacks in case of technical problems. In between sessions I can be contacted at brendan.barnes@missingelephant.com or on 07876214620 for text messages. 

My approach is based on my integrative training, which means that I draw on resources from different schools of psychotherapy. This can be helpful given the different backgrounds and preferred ways of working that clients bring to counselling. Within the wide range of psychotherapies that exist, my own approach is based on the humanistic tradition, with a strong influence from existential and attachment theory. In my post-qualification training, I have focused on better understanding the impact of trauma. 

·         Humanistic approaches to counselling emphasise the quality of the relationship between counsellor and client and are underpinned by a belief in the human desire to grow and self-heal.

·         Existentialism focuses on the meaning that we attach to our lives and our responsibility to make the right choices in order to live meaningful lives in the face of anxiety and uncertainty.

·         Attachment theory sees our way of being in the world (sometimes called an internal working model”) as having its roots in experiences in early life.

·         Trauma was previously thought about mainly in relation to extreme events, but is now seen as both more complex (and common) 

In terms of background, I studied Psychology at University (1977-80). Following graduation, I worked in the private sector initially in London and, for the last 20 years, in Brussels. In 2016, following a reflection on the values that had guided my career to that point, I commenced training as an Integrative Counsellor with the Minster Centre. I have been working with clients since 2019. Recent work with clients has addressed anxiety, panic, trauma, anger, depression, and loss of meaning.

My previous career has been useful to me as a counsellor, not least in working with different cultures and values, but working as a counsellor entails a quite different way of looking at life. Perhaps the most important difference is to allow space for exploration of personal conflicts and to acknowledge respectfully the uncertainty that many of us confront every day. Life can be difficult, but always contains the possibility of growth and change. 

Barbican, London, Greater London, EC2Y

Type of session

In person
Online

Types of client

Young adults (18-24)
Adults (25-64)
Older Adults (65+)

Key details

DBS check info

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Online platforms

Whatsapp
Zoom