Samantha White

I currently have availability for regular sessions on:

- Tuesday 

- Wednesday 

Hello, thanks for considering me for your counselling. I'm passionate about helping people, and endeavour to provide a warm yet professional relationship where you can talk without being judged and process your experiences safely.

Together we can work on current problems, or past events whether specific issues or a more general sense of unease or dissatisfaction- your problem is real for you, and nothing is too ‘small’ or ‘big’ to make use of counselling. 

Counselling can help in many ways:

- process painful emotions 

- learn to trust yourself

- break unhelpful patterns

- reconnect with your sense of self

- make sense and find meaning

- relate better to yourself and others 

- making difficult decisions 

- coping with life changes

- move through feeling stuck 

- reduce stress

- personal development 

- problem solving

Health Problems: My 20 year healthcare background and own diagnosis of arthritis gives me a special interest in helping people with the psychological impact of physical illness, and life-changing medical conditions, be it their own or another’s. This may include processing the diagnosis, living with pain or how illness changes life, caring for someone, and fear of the future amongst the many and complex challenges illness can bring.

Work Stress and Career Change: I have experienced my own considerable work stress, as well as anxiety around career decisions and re-training. Consequently I understand and can help with the challenges of finding a work life balance and how we can find ourselves depleted and separated from our sense of self when stress and work troubles shadow our every day life.

I am qualified as an integrative therapist, meaning that I was trained to be flexible in how I work with clients because evidence tells us no one ‘type’ of therapy fits all, rather that the collaborative relationship between counsellor and client sits at the heart of the counselling process.

I mainly integrate person centred counselling with CBT, though I do draw on some psychodynamic, relational, and solution focused theories.

- I like to arrange an initial call to introduce ourselves and clarify your needs and expectations. We’ll also check our availability and preferred way of working is compatible.

- After this we can arrange our first session where we can agree on the terms of us working together and I will do a more detailed counselling assessment to start the counselling process. 

- At this session we will both sign a working agreement- this doesn’t bind you to any set number of sessions, it’s to ensure we have professional working boundaries and that I abide by the principles set out by my ethical body. It covers things like payment arrangements, cancellation policy, and where you can seek support should you need to complain.

- In this first session we will have time for you to start opening up about your feelings and experiences, and it’s all up to you what level of detail and depth you go in to.

- You will have the opportunity to experience how I work as a counsellor, though the relationship and depth of work in counselling  usually increases over time so this one session may not be entirely representative of a typical session.

- At the end of that first hour we can talk about whether you would like to book for future sessions, and there is no obligation. You don’t need to decide there and then either.