Gill Jackman

I'm so sorry but I am currently unavailable to new clients. 

Hello. I'm so sorry but I am currently not available to new clients. If I was it would be important that you know I only offer face to face weekly appointments, inside. I do not use text or have initial discussions. I use zoom in an emergency only. Please see my website for all details, terms and conditions. If anything is unclear, please email with any questions. I'm Gill Jackman and have been in private practice since 1997, when I qualified at post-graduate level. After 26 years of working long-term I am now only offering short-term, highly focused work: 

My MSc was completed in 1998 and I'm a senior accredited practitioner and supervisor. I have a comprehensive website where my credentials and approach are made explicit and would recommend reading it for a coherent and grounded understanding of my work, my values and what I charge. I live in the deep countryside and consider seeing people face-to-face is essential unless there's a problem.  

Short-term counselling with me is about identifying the specifics of a problem and getting an understanding of what's going on.  Whether this is only through a first long consultation or over a period of six sessions, the aim is for the client to end with a clear way of looking at the difficulty and a strong sense of what they need to do, either for themselves or through seeking further help elsewhere. 

I have spent 25 years working with people long term.  Although this is a commitment I can no longer offer, my experience in this area leaves me well placed to offer insights and understand what you may need.  

I also counsel couples. My aim is to hear how the relationship is experienced for both parties and to see clearly how the dynamics of the relationship are operating. A couple is essentially a ‘system’ which develops its own rules, beliefs and values. Often these ‘ways of being’ have been passed down from our parents and we have absorbed what it is to be a husband/wife/father/lover/mother from our own families. Untangling this to see what we do and why can give us choice about the way we wish to proceed.

First sessions, in his new way I have of working, are for an hour and a half and cost £100. This allows time for you to express what's going on and also for me to assess what you need and offer it. We'll then make a plan for how to proceed up to a maximum of a further 5 sessions, each for an hour at a cost of £70 per session. It's essential in this work, that whether you have two sessions or several, the last one is planned for and attended.

Couple therapy costs £130 for an hour and a half and all further sessions are also for 90 minutes

I am now an unreliable supervisor!  As a consistent support to you on a monthly basis - something all counsellors need, I am unable to taker on supervisees.  However, I'm more than happy to provide occasional sessions for troubleshooting, clarifying the way out of ethical dilemmas or helping you to focus on what might be really needed in your practice.  

After 25 years of working long-term with clients and with supervisees, I'm now only offering trouble-shooting for private practitioners and consultancy for systems offering training or voluntary sector counselling.  I charge £100 for an hour and a half - £70 for an hour.

To understand where I'm coming from and my values around the work, please see the practice description below.  

As a senior accredited, person-centred supervisor, the welfare of my supervisees is as important to me as the welfare of their clients (I see them as deeply intertwined) so although my way of supervising revolves around supporting you, it also involves working at relational depth and exploring transference and counter-transference in what can be difficult work. I'm particularly focused on the attachment and dependency needs of clients and making sure they are addressed and cared for. As a supervisee, the onus is on you to bring and openly share your work and concerns.

I work to a contract and with clear boundaries as I do with my clients. In the future, the commitment will be session by session. I have, over the last 25 years, had private supervisees as well as a variety of groups and individuals in the voluntary and education sectors. I am a senior accredited BACP supervisor, have been working in this role for 20 years, am committed to using the BACP’s ethical framework as a guide, and have facilitated numerous counsellors in their struggle through the accreditation process. I wish you well.

I listen and the onus is on you to tell me about your work and what's happening in it. I then discuss it with you, making recommendations and bringing awareness of any blind spots. For anyone working longer than 6 session with clients, I am likely to focus on the boundaries of your work.

Training is not therapy but is more focused and specific.  We'll have a one to one assessment to identify what needs to be addressed, followed by an exploration of that problem.  From this, I'll suggest a variety of tasks which we can practice doing together in the session so that they can be followed up at home.  Together we will build a whole raft of cognitive-behavioural solutions applicable to achieving what you're trying to achieve in your everyday life.

An assessment where you try to talk about the difficulty and I mostly listen before creating a summary of the difficulty.  If you think this fits for you, we'll come up with some homework, see how you get on and pick it up the following week, tailoring our next step to what you've learned.