Mikiko Akeda

My current working hours

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday

Mornings (at the earliest 8:30 am), Afternoons, and Evenings (at the latest 9:30 pm) 

** My availability changes, so please contact me to enquire about current availability. 

I am here to offer you a safe, warm, non-judgmental, and confidential space where you can talk freely about anything on your mind. You will be heard and accepted, and I will support you in exploring your thoughts, feelings and behaviours from different perspectives, to understand yourself better and make sense of what your challenges mean to you.

I provide once-weekly 50 minutes of face-to-face, online or phone sessions for adults (18+). I charge £50 per session (The assessment sessions are also charged at £50).

In my private practice, I work from a caravan on my property, a comfortable and exclusive counselling room in Wash Common, Newbury. 

I have lived in England for 24 years and enjoy life in the U.K. I am interested in cultural differences, and my experience as a minority in society has allowed me to understand what "being different from others" feels like. I have gained deep insight into "feeling alone" and realised that anyone can feel this way, no matter what their nationality, especially when it feels like no one can understand your struggles.

In my early career, I was given the opportunity to meet people from different backgrounds and listen to their personal stories of life and struggles. I realised how important it is to have someone who listens to your story. Having a safe space to talk can provide a powerful and positive impact on mental health. This experience sparked my interest in counselling.

This motivated me to take the integrated course first so that I might learn all the different models of counselling. As a result of the study, I became particularly interested in the psychodynamic approach, which looks into our issues and history of life at a more profound level and leads us to become more self-aware, and perhaps, we can make better choices.

After six years of studying and training, I started working as a fully qualified Psychodynamic Counsellor at my private practice and also at Basingstoke Counselling Service, which supports the local community.

I am here for you to bring anything you would like to talk about. I have worked with a wide range of issues, including anxiety, depression, grief and loss, trauma, and relationship problems. 

I work Psychodynamically, which means that I am particularly interested in hearing about what is on your mind. My work aims to bring what is in the unconscious, which is repressed, inhibited and bottled up under the surface, into consciousness. So that we can talk and think about those pushed-down thoughts and feelings together. I believe the problem is often deeply rooted and its origins in childhood experiences. Therefore, I would ask about your family history and childhood memories, in which you might see some patterns and links between your past experiences and what you currently face as challenges. I will offer you a professional environment with confidentiality, non-judgemental and empathy, where you will be invited to put anything on your mind into words freely when you feel safe and comfortable enough to do so. 

It is essential for you to find the right therapist, and I would like to ensure that what I offer benefits you. For that reason, our first 3 meetings will be treated as assessment sessions to allow you to experience what my counselling feels like for you, and we can consider if we would work well together.

After those assessment sessions, you'll want to digest our discussion and decide whether you would like to start our weekly sessions in an open-ended way (no particular number of total sessions to be set at the beginning).

Once we decide to go ahead with our future work, we will arrange regular weekly meeting times for our journey together.