Brendan Barnes

Verified Professional

Every professional displayed on Counselling Directory has been independently verified by our team to ensure they have suitable credentials to practise.

Read about verification

Online and Face-to-Face Sessions

I offer online and face-to-face counselling in Central London (Farringdon/Barbican area). I am available for short-term counselling of 6-12 sessions and longer-term work. The duration of therapy is open-ended but with regular check-ins to ensure that the work remains relevant to your needs.

I see counselling as a collaboration between the two of us. My role is to support you in the issues that brought you to counselling.  People are complex and multi-faceted. We each have our own story. I do not claim to have “all the answers”, but I aim to help people find their own answers. To do this, I attend to my client’s way of being, including their family, social and cultural context. These things shape us and the freedom we have to build our own lives, but we are actors in our own lives. Put another way, The way we see ourselves, others and the world around us is the result of choices we have made, but we also make assumptions and take on board the assumptions of others. 

Through a process of dialogue, we have the possibility to explore your values, beliefs, choices, and assumptions and how you experience yourself and how you relate to others. In the recent past, I have worked with anxiety, stress, depression, anger, and feelings of loss of meaning and direction. Considering alternative perspectives and exploring our behaviours and experiences with another person allows us to reconnect with who we really are and create the conditions for growth. 

Counselling can change lives, but committing to counselling is a big step for anyone. It’s important that you define the direction and pace of the work. Our work is led by your needs. The conditions need to be right and that can take time. For any 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. I am committed to providing a safe, supportive, and non-judgmental environment for these conversations. I believe that counselling works best when there is sufficient trust between the counsellor and the client to allow the therapist to question, explore and challenge the client’s thinking. That can be uncomfortable (sometimes for both of us) but it is by questioning what we think we know about ourselves that insight emerges about our internal processes and narratives. 

It is not all about exploration. Counselling should be a shared exploration, but I also recognize that sometimes what my clients need is very practical support, guidance and education.

Why consider counselling? When I talk to people, sometimes they bring a particular issue, 

“I am worried about my use of……”

“ I feel angry at my partner about his lack of commitment”

…………but sometimes it is just a sense that things aren’t right. 

“something’s gone off with my relationships”

“I feel anxious – the world doesn’t feel safe”

I don’t ask that people come with a clear problem statement, but it’s fine to start from there. Both the specific and the general are valid start points for counselling. 

You’ll have noticed that I used the word “work” a couple of times in the preceding paragraphs. I also suggested what I bring to the process. That is less than half the story. The work is about you and your commitment is essential to making change happen. So is finding the quality time and space which you give yourself for this process of self-care.

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. In my post-qualification training, I have focused on better understanding the impact of trauma. 

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

my standard rate is £60 per session but I am open to discussion where affordability is an issue

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. Practitioners are bound by an 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 at the outset as part of the contracting process between therapist and client. I offer counselling online and face-to-face or a mixture of the two. I discuss and agree the format of our sessions together with my clients. 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. I seek to be genuine, supportive and authentic in my relationships with clients. 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.