Martha O'Brien

I offer both in-person and online sessions. Please be aware that I am often fully booked for in-person sessions.

My usual working hours are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

I am a qualified and BACP registered Humanistic Psychotherapist with over 10 years experience as a therapist, trainer, and supervisor.

About Counselling

Counselling provides you with dedicated safe space and time to examine your experiences, your relationships, and your relationship with yourself. This helps you to develop your own understanding of what you are feeling and why, and consider if there are changes that would be helpful for you. My role in this is to accompany and guide you in this exploration, informed by psychological theory and professional knowledge about human development and relationships, while being genuinely interested in you as a person.

The fact is all of us can have experiences which bring up difficult emotions or reactions for us, but it can often be difficult to talk about them with people in our lives, which can leave us feeling alone, unheard, confused, frustrated, low, angry, or scared.

These experiences might be things like;

• patterns in your relationships which feel unhelpful or unhealthy for you
• ways of reacting to situations which affect how you feel able to engage with life
• a particular life experience which was difficult and which you would like support to work through
• difficult or negative emotions about yourself

My work as a counsellor is to facilitate your exploration - compassionately, non-judgmentally, safely, adventurously - of what you are experiencing. The aim is that you gain a deeper understanding of yourself and your responses to your experiences so that you can feel connected to what feels healthy for you and respond and make decisions from that place.

In counselling we will aim to;

Recognise with integrity and honesty what you are experiencing (e.g. I might get very angry, while inwardly I’m feeling a sense of powerlessness or anxiety)

Become aware of why and how you are experiencing these patterns in your life.

Investigate, with compassion, what generates and fuels these patterns to give yourself deeper insight and therefore more agency over your own experiences. This might involve looking at your past and making these connections together.

Consider how you could make changes in your life, if you wish to, and support you through therapy as you do this in your own time. For many people this stage happens naturally, without any conscious change having to be made, but having space to reflect on these changes in therapy is helpful to consolidate them. For others it might be useful to use specific techniques and approaches to create specific change e.g. managing anxiety symptoms / anger responses while also finding ways to change these happening in the first place.

In all of this we will aim to create space to be with and to process experiences and emotions. Change and understanding do not come about through intellectual understanding alone, so spending time to really allow you to process the impact of previous and current experiences is an important part of therapy.

I also have a particular experience working with;

Individuals who want to navigate issues in their relationships with others (romantic, family, friends, work)

Individuals who are experiencing some form of work-related overwhelm or burnout, particularly if this is in the helping professions (education, social, or health care).

In our first session together you can expect:

• To spend some time talking about what to expect in counselling.
• For me to ask questions about your experience and what you want from counselling.
• For us to consider some areas of focus / ways of working
• For you to have time to talk about your self and your experience.
• To feel you have experienced what it would be like to have counselling with me, so you can decide whether it feels right to work together. 

I offer online sessions only - if you would like to consider online therapy, but are unsure about whether this would suit you, please feel free to reach out.

My usual session hours are:

Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday: 8am - 2pm 

I am a qualified and BACP registered Humanistic Psychotherapist with over 10 years experience as a therapist, trainer, and supervisor.

About Counselling

Counselling provides you with dedicated safe space and time to examine your experiences, your relationships, and your relationship with yourself. This helps you to develop your own understanding of what you are feeling and why, and consider if there are changes that would be helpful for you. My role in this is to accompany and guide you in this exploration, informed by psychological theory and professional knowledge about human development and relationships, while being genuinely interested in you as a person.

The fact is all of us can have experiences which bring up difficult emotions or reactions for us, but it can often be difficult to talk about them with people in our lives, which can leave us feeling alone, unheard, confused, frustrated, low, angry, or scared.

These experiences might be things like;

• patterns  in your relationships which feel unhelpful or unhealthy for you
• ways of reacting to situations which affect how you feel able to engage with life
• a particular life experience which was difficult and which you would like support to work through
• difficult or negative emotions about yourself

My work as a counsellor is to facilitate your exploration - compassionately, non-judgmentally, safely, adventurously - of what you are experiencing. The aim is that you gain a deeper understanding of yourself and your responses to your experiences so that you can feel connected to what feels healthy for you and respond and make decisions from that place.

In our first session together you can expect:

• To spend some time talking about what to expect in counselling.
• For me to ask questions about your experience and what you want from counselling.
• For us to consider some areas of focus / ways of working 
• For you to have time to talk about your self and your experience. 
• To feel you have experienced what it would be like to have counselling with me, so you can decide whether it feels right to work together. 

I offer supervision online only - if you are unsure if online work would suit you, please feel free to get in touch for an informal chat about this.

I offer supervision at the following times:

Monday throughout the day

Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday afternoons

Friday throughout the day

I offer concessionary rates for trainees.

Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul be just another human soul" - Carl Jung

Much is said about the benefits of supervision, less is said about what a vulnerable experience it can be. As a supervisor I endeavour to bring all my professional experience as a therapist and a supervisor into the room in service of you, your work, and your clients, but as we sit together I endeavour to meet you as a colleague and a person.

Who do I work with?

I have been supporting other therapists since 2021. I work with therapists in private practice and within organisations.

My training background is humanistic, although I have supported therapists from diverse modalities. Given my background and experience I am most suited to supervising therapists from a humanistic or integrative modality.

I have particular experience in supporting trainee therapists, having taught on training programmes, supervised trainees, and run a training placement.

My professional experience with clients focuses on 2 main client groups; adolescents and young adults in statutory and voluntary sector services, and individual adults in private practice focusing on their experience of relationships.

I also offer professional supervision to other helping professionals, such as education, health, and social care staff. Working in these professions requires you to be in relationship with others in a supportive, and often in a challenging, role. You are required to contain others who are feeling uncontained and hear and witness the difficulties and traumas of others. This all has an impact on your self, and on how you might be able to show up in work. Many of the people from these professions who I supervise may be experiencing burnout, overwhelm, a sense of shut down in their personal life or relationships. Supervision can support you with these experiences and can help you to find a more personal sustainability in work. 

What is supervision?

From my perspective, and what I focus on offering, supervision provides:

Self-care and development, through attending to those parts of self which are touched and activated by our work with our clients. We are a whole self, and our whole self comes into the work with us, and our work is contained in our whole self. Attending to all parts of self which have contact with the work and are affected by it is an essential task of supervision, to ensure we can return to the work with integrity, and can return to ourselves with clarity. Self care and development are often hard work and I welcome your needs into the supervision space.

Professional development through developing our reflexive practice, allowing you to be curious, compassionately critical, and celebratory in reflecting on your practice as a means to continue to grow and develop as the practitioner you are.

Professional support - we know that one of the common denominators in burnout is a lack of regular, supportive, trustworthy supervision. Supervision is a resource for you to gain support and receive holding, alongside collaborative professional guidance.

It is essential that you feel completely supported by your supervisor - both in celebration and in critical awareness. I take a strengths based approach to supervision, meaning that we we always make room for what is going well, and what you have to offer.

In our first session you can expect that :

• We discuss the practicalities of supervision
• I will ask you about your practice and your previous experiences of supervision
• We may agree some ways of working together or particular areas you want to ensure we focus on i.e. what you your needs?
• We have space for you to ask any questions.
• We begin the process of holding your work so that you can have an experience of supervision with me, giving you the chance to judge whether working with me would feel right for you.

I offer supervision at the following times:

Monday throughout the day

Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday afternoons

Friday throughout the day

I offer concessionary rates for trainees.

Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul be just another human soul" - Carl Jung

Much is said about the benefits of supervision, less is said about what a vulnerable experience it can be. As a supervisor I endeavour to bring all my professional experience as a therapist and a supervisor into the room in service of you, your work, and your clients, but as we sit together I endeavour to meet you as a colleague and a person.

Who do I work with?

I have been supporting other therapists since 2021. I work with therapists in private practice and within organisations.

My training background is humanistic, although I have supported therapists from diverse modalities. Given my background and experience I am most suited to supervising therapists from a humanistic or integrative modality.

I have particular experience in supporting trainee therapists, having taught on training programmes, supervised trainees, and run a training placement.

My professional experience with clients focuses on 2 main client groups; adolescents and young adults in statutory and voluntary sector services, and individual adults in private practice focusing on their experience of relationships.

I also offer professional supervision to other helping professionals, such as education, health, and social care staff. Working in these professions requires you to be in relationship with others in a supportive, and often in a challenging, role. You are required to contain others who are feeling uncontained and hear and witness the difficulties and traumas of others. This all has an impact on your self, and on how you might be able to show up in work. Many of the people from these professions who I supervise may be experiencing burnout, overwhelm, a sense of shut down in their personal life or relationships. Supervision can support you with these experiences and can help you to find a more personal sustainability in work. 

What is supervision?

From my perspective, and what I focus on offering, supervision provides:

Self-care and development, through attending to those parts of self which are touched and activated by our work with our clients. We are a whole self, and our whole self comes into the work with us, and our work is contained in our whole self. Attending to all parts of self which have contact with the work and are affected by it is an essential task of supervision, to ensure we can return to the work with integrity, and can return to ourselves with clarity. Self care and development are often hard work and I welcome your needs into the supervision space.

Professional development through developing our reflexive practice, allowing you to be curious, compassionately critical, and celebratory in reflecting on your practice as a means to continue to grow and develop as the practitioner you are.

Professional support - we know that one of the common denominators in burnout is a lack of regular, supportive, trustworthy supervision. Supervision is a resource for you to gain support and receive holding, alongside collaborative professional guidance.

It is essential that you feel completely supported by your supervisor - both in celebration and in critical awareness. I take a strengths based approach to supervision, meaning that we we always make room for what is going well, and what you have to offer.

In our first session you can expect that :

• We discuss the practicalities of supervision
• I will ask you about your practice and your previous experiences of supervision
• We may agree some ways of working together or particular areas you want to ensure we focus on i.e. what you your needs?
• We have space for you to ask any questions.
• We begin the process of holding your work so that you can have an experience of supervision with me, giving you the chance to judge whether working with me would feel right for you.