Hope Therapy & Counselling Services

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About us

The world is supposed to have shifted back to normal by now. The cards have stopped coming. People have stopped asking how you are with that particular tone of voice. The funeral is months — maybe years — behind you. And yet here you are, still in the middle of something that does not feel like it has ended.

If that is what brought you here, you are not behind. Grief does not run on a schedule, and the public timeline for it — a few weeks of acute sadness, a few months of adjustment, and then back to who you were before — bears very little relation to how the experience actually unfolds. Some of what you are carrying may be very far from the version of grief that anyone around you would recognise.

What our grief and bereavement work looks like

Grief comes in many shapes. The death of someone close — sudden or slow, expected or impossible, recent or long past. The loss of a relationship. The loss of a future you had been planning for. The loss that does not have a name — a parent who is still alive but no longer the person they were, a friendship that did not so much end as fade, the unborn child, the version of yourself you were before a diagnosis or a redundancy or an experience you did not choose. All of these are real losses. All of them deserve attention.

Our work with grief begins with making space for what is actually being grieved — which is often more than is initially obvious. From there, depending on what fits, the work may draw on person-centred approaches that prioritise the felt experience of loss, on CBT-informed work where grief has become entangled with anxiety or low mood, on meaning-centred approaches developed specifically for bereavement, or on longer-term relational work for losses that go deep into how you were shaped earlier in life.

What we do not do is treat grief as a problem to be solved or a stage to be moved through on a timetable. The work is led by the pace your system needs, not by a clinical schedule.

Including complicated grief, anticipatory grief, and traumatic loss

Sometimes grief becomes complicated — when the death was sudden or violent, when the relationship was difficult, when other losses are layered into it, when you were not able to grieve at the time. Sometimes grief comes before the loss itself — caring for someone with a terminal illness, watching a parent disappear into dementia, knowing that something is coming and not being able to do anything but wait. We work with all of this.

Online sessions, available wherever you are

The majority of our work is conducted online. For grief work, that often matters: travelling to an in-person appointment when you are exhausted, when getting dressed feels like a project, when leaving the house feels exposing — these can be barriers. Online sessions remove them. You can have the work from your own space, in your own time. Face-to-face sessions are available in some locations — please ask.

Who you would be working with

Hope Therapy is a team of more than 90 qualified counsellors and therapists, including practitioners with specialist training and experience in bereavement, complicated grief, and life transition. Every therapist is a registered member of a UK professional body. We are an NCPS Organisational Member.

How starting works

A free 15-minute consultation is the most useful first step. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing. You do not need to have a clear sense of what you want to talk about. You do not need to have moved through any particular “stage” of grief. You do not need to be ready in any particular way. You just need to have decided that a conversation might be useful.

A note on what we don't offer

We do not provide crisis support and do not work with people who are actively at risk of harming themselves. If that is where you are right now, the right support is Cruse Bereavement (0808 808 1677), the Samaritans (116 123, free, 24 hours), your GP, or 999 in an emergency.

One honest thing

Grief does not end. What can change is your relationship with it. Over time, with the right support, the experience often shifts from something that is happening to you to something that is part of who you are — held differently, integrated into the rest of your life, no longer the thing that defines every day. That shift is not a forgetting. It is a kind of carrying. We can do this work with you.

When you are ready, we are here.

Training, qualifications & experience

Our mental health and wellbeing support includes private clients looking for personal counselling (One to One, Couples & Families) through to Large County Councils, Charities and Companies where the organisation may be arranging or funding sessions, possibly through an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) arrangement.

We have access to counsellors covering a large number of areas throughout England, so you may well be able to see us face-to-face wherever you are. However, we all offer Skype, Zoom and telephone support, so wherever you are, we will be able to work with you. People work with us from literally all areas of the country and, in some cases, from abroad.