Nick Ratcliff

Practising from Nottingham working on-line only offering counselling and psychotherapy, I work to provide a warm, accepting environment where you'll be supported in dealing with what you bring to the therapy. An authentic, confidential and secure atmosphere for therapy allows the opportunity to explore, understand and work towards your therapeutic goals, with the passion and humour I bring for this work.

Choosing to start counselling can be a challenge. Dealing with the "difficult stuff" is something we are all capable of avoiding. It needs to feel safe enough to talk about what can feel the most vulnerable, and at times hardest to put into words. This is my role, to create the atmosphere where there is trust in; lack of being judged, found too much, or not enough, being heard and seen, and valued.

How you see, feel and experience yourself is the expert opinion and that matters. Matters to me, and matters in how you relate to yourself. It can be all too often that events from the past, distant or recent, impact your life right now. The result might be anxiety, depression, anger, a sense of shame or hurt. These feelings matter and are part of making the choices that shape our lives.

Therapy is about just that, understanding and perhaps regaining power in relation to choices, or in our responses to choices that were made for us. Working at your pace, I aim to offer support so fresh ways of seeing yourself, options and choices become available.

With a range of therapeutic styles integrated in the way I work, including Humanistic Person-Centred, Existential, DBT informed therapy, EMDR, Schema, Mindfulness and others I aim to create a therapy with and for you to support your needs and wants from therapy.

Email is the most effective way to get in touch with me at: nick_ratcliff@hotmail.com

Anger and Stress Management
Experiential Group Work
Psychoeducational Group Work

First Contact:
Email or call and we can speak to arrange an initial meeting. An initial meeting will be for both you and I to get an idea if and how we could work together. We would also talk about how often we might meet and the few other practicalities for starting the process. The initial consultation is free.

Ongoing Reviews:
I find it valuable to regularly review where we are in the course of the work, although this is also an on-going process. Taking a short amount of time to review the work helps to make sure we keep focussed on your therapeutic goals.

Finishing:
Of course any client is free to finish at any time. It has proven to be valuable to give some notice to the completion of our work together, I hope that clients will neither feel cheated because they were pushed out before feeling ready nor held onto beyond the goals that they've set.

Therapeutic Style:
I've trained on an on going basis since 2003 and I blend a number of styles of work, based on both training and style requirement for where I've worked. This means I can work in a brief or more solution focussed manner and also with clients on a longer term basis with more complex or challenging issues.

Training and History:
I practised initially providing Anger Management training for the British Association of Anger Management. Once I'd completed that specific training and started working for BAAM I then starting training with Spectrum, a Humanistic Integrative Experiential centre in London to continue extending my therapeutic practice. The Anger Management courses proved successful in Drug and Alcohol Treatment Centres where I then moved on to practice, whilst continuing broader therapeutic training. Around 2006 I moved from London to the East Midlands and started a training at Sherwood Psychotherapy Training Institute for a Post Graduate qualification and towards accreditation by UKCP which I completed in 2013. In early 2017 I started working as Recovery Lead and Therapist at the Priory Hospital in Nottingham, an acute mental health unit, which involved implementation of a Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) programme. The hospital achieved Outstanding at that year's CQC assessment. With EMDR now a key part of my practice as I work toward accreditation with the EMDR Association the trauma focus of my practice is a greatly enhanced.