How I work.

Sessions are 60 minutes, delivered over a secure video platform from wherever you are most comfortable. There are no worksheets, no prescribed exercises, and no scripts. The hour is conversation-led — what matters most that week is what we focus on — but it is held within a clear thread we agree at the very start of the engagement, so that the work doesn't drift even when individual sessions take their own shape.

I tend to listen far more than I speak in early sessions, which most clients tell me is part of why the space feels different. As the engagement settles, we move more freely between listening, gentle reflection, and the kind of careful noticing that helps a transition come into focus.

Transitions don't move in straight lines. There are weeks of clarity followed by weeks of fog. Months that seem to settle, then a single phone call that disrupts everything. A counselling engagement that is paced around this reality — rather than against it — gives the work somewhere to breathe.

Most engagements at Ivybridge run weekly to begin, with the option to space sessions slightly further apart in the second half if the work calls for that. This isn't about rigidity. It is about giving the engagement enough rhythm that the in-between weeks become part of the work, not a gap in it.

Every engagement begins with a written intake. The intake is a short structured document covering your background, the transition you are moving through, what you hope the work might help with, and any practical context I should know. I read the intake before our first session, which means we are not spending the first hour on basics that would be better held in writing.

I keep brief contemporaneous notes during the engagement, held securely and only for the duration the law and professional standards require. At the end of the engagement, I produce a written session summary — a record of what was covered, what surfaced, and any patterns worth carrying forward. The summary is yours to keep permanently.

Ivybridge Counselling is a structured counselling practice for adults moving through life transitions, relationship change, and family adjustment. It is not a clinical psychiatric service, a crisis service, or a service for acute mental-health presentations that need specialist treatment, medication management, or hospital-based care.

When an enquiry sits outside this scope, I say so honestly and signpost to providers better suited to the need. That might be the GP, NHS Talking Therapies, a bereavement specialist, a crisis service, or another counsellor whose specialism is a closer fit. Saying "this isn't the right place for what you need" is part of doing this work properly.

A typical engagement begins with a Discovery Conversation, after which we agree which engagement length is the right fit. The first session of the agreed engagement is anchoring — we revisit the intake together, set a clear thread for the work, and begin. Middle sessions tend to settle into a rhythm; the work often deepens around the third or fourth session as the transition starts to come into focus.

The closing session of an engagement is given over to drawing the thread together, naming what has shifted, and acknowledging what is still in motion. The written summary follows within one working day. If a longer engagement is helpful afterwards, it is re-booked explicitly — never assumed.