David Morris

I offer counselling Monday to Friday, with face-to-face sessions available in Twickenham and Richmond, as well as online.

Please contact me to check current availability and we can discuss which location and appointment time would work best for you.

I offer a free 20-minute phone or video conversation before we arrange a first counselling session. This allows us to talk briefly about what has brought you to counselling and whether working together might feel right to you.

As a humanistic counsellor, I see you as a whole person with your own unique experience, rather than as a problem to be solved or a collection of symptoms. At the heart of the humanistic approach is a belief that we each have the capacity to grow and find our own way forward, even when difficult experiences make those possibilities hard to see.

My role isn't to give you answers or tell you what to do, but to develop a relationship in which you can explore your experiences, understand yourself more fully and discover what feels right for you.

In the counselling room, you can expect a conversation between two people. I'll listen carefully, but I won't just sit silently while you do all the talking. I may notice things, ask questions, wonder about something with you, or sometimes gently challenge you. I hope you'll experience me as interested, genuine and engaged — someone alongside you rather than observing you from the other side of the room.

Before becoming a counsellor, I spent many years working internationally in television news and broadcasting. Living and working among different people and cultures deepened my curiosity about people's lives and the experiences that shape us, while also showing me how much we share as human beings.

One of the things I value most about counselling is seeing someone discover a new possibility for themselves and begin to make their own changes. Ultimately, the counselling belongs to you. If you eventually reach the point where you don't need me anymore, I think we've probably done something worthwhile together.

Perhaps you're feeling anxious or overwhelmed, finding relationships difficult, struggling with anger or emotions that sometimes feel hard to manage. You may be dealing with loss, trauma or a difficult experience from the past, or finding that familiar patterns keep repeating themselves even though you'd like things to be different.

Or perhaps nothing is obviously “wrong”. You may be questioning who you are, struggling with self-esteem or self-criticism, feeling exhausted by the effort of coping, or simply wondering why life seems harder than you think it should.

For some people, questions around ADHD, ASD or neurodiversity are part of this. A diagnosis — or beginning to wonder whether you might be neurodivergent — can sometimes make sense of experiences stretching back many years. I'm interested not simply in a label, but in what your particular experience means for you.

I work with adults and young people aged 11–18. With younger clients, this might include relationships, family life, school, anger, anxiety, identity, independence or trying to understand yourself at a time when a great deal can be changing.

My training draws on Person-Centred counselling, Gestalt and Transactional Analysis. These inform how I understand what we discover together, but I don't work from a formula or decide in advance what technique you need. We begin with you and what has brought you to counselling, and see where the conversation takes us.

I offer a free 20-minute phone or video conversation before arranging a first counselling session. This isn't a counselling session or an assessment; it's simply an opportunity for us to speak before deciding whether to work together.

You can tell me a little about what has brought you to counselling and what you're hoping for, and you can ask me anything you'd like to know about me or the way I work. It also gives us both an opportunity to get a sense of whether working together might feel right.

If we decide to go ahead, our first counselling session lasts 50 minutes. I'll usually ask a little more about what has brought you to counselling and what is happening in your life at the moment, but you don't need to arrive with a prepared story or feel that you have to tell me everything at once.

We'll also talk through some of the practical aspects of working together, including confidentiality and its limits, and you'll have plenty of opportunity to ask questions.

Most importantly, the first session is the beginning of us getting to know one another. There isn't a particular way you're supposed to “do” counselling, and there's no expectation that we need to cover everything in that first meeting. We can begin wherever feels most useful to you and take things at a pace that feels manageable.

You don't have to decide in advance that I'm the right counsellor for you. The first session is also an opportunity for you to experience what it's like talking with me and decide whether you'd like us to continue.