Counselling is a talking therapy — a space where you can say the things that are hard to say anywhere else, to someone whose only job is to listen without judgment and help you understand yourself more clearly.
That's the short version. The longer version is worth knowing, because there's a lot of confusion about what counselling actually involves, what it isn't, and whether it's the right thing for any particular person.
What counselling actually is
It's a conversation — a specific kind, in a specific kind of space. What you say stays in the room. You bring whatever's on your mind, and the counsellor listens and helps you work through it.
What makes it different from talking to a friend isn't just the training (though that matters). It's the quality of the attention. A counsellor is listening without thinking about their own response, without drawing on their own experience to offer an opinion, without an agenda about where the conversation should go. That kind of attention is rare, and most people find it feels quite different from any other conversation they have.
It's also different because it's yours. The hour is entirely for you — not a catch-up, not a favour, not something that has to be reciprocal. Just space to think.
What counselling is not
Counselling is not advice. A counsellor won't tell you what to do, what decision to make, or how to handle a particular situation. That surprises some people, because it seems like the obvious useful thing — but advice rarely leads to lasting change, because it gives you someone else's answer to your own question. What counselling does instead is help you understand yourself well enough to find your own answer.
Counselling is not diagnosis. A counsellor is not a doctor or a psychiatrist, and a counselling session is not a clinical assessment. If you describe something that sounds like depression or anxiety, a counsellor won't hand you a label — they'll work with the actual experience of what you're going through.
And counselling is not just for people in crisis. A lot of people come to counselling because something feels off, or because they want to understand themselves better, or because they've been carrying something heavy for a long time. You don't have to be at rock bottom to benefit from it.
What actually happens in a session
You talk about whatever feels most relevant. There's no prescribed topic and no structure you have to follow. Some sessions stay with one thread; others move around. Sometimes a session is hard and you leave feeling wrung out. Sometimes something shifts that you didn't expect to shift. Often it's just the steady, reliable experience of being properly heard — which turns out to be more useful than it sounds.
A session is typically 50 minutes. Most people see their counsellor weekly, at least to start with. There's no set number of sessions — that depends on what you're dealing with, how you find the process, and what feels right for you. There's more on that in how many sessions will I need.
Counselling gives you somewhere to put the things you've been carrying around. That's simpler than it sounds, and more useful than most people expect.
What is the difference between counselling and therapy?
In practice, not much. The terms are used interchangeably by most people, including most practitioners. If there's a distinction, it's roughly this: counselling can sometimes refer to shorter-term, more focused work around a specific issue, while therapy or psychotherapy sometimes implies something longer-term or more in-depth. But these aren't fixed definitions, and the same person might use both terms to describe what they do.
What matters far more than the label is the practitioner's training, their registration with a professional body like the BACP, and whether the approach feels right for you.
What is person-centred counselling?
Person-centred counselling is the approach I use. It was developed by Carl Rogers in the 1950s and is one of the most widely-practised therapeutic approaches in the UK. The core idea is that you are the expert on your own experience — not the counsellor. The counsellor's job is to show up with genuine warmth, honesty, and the kind of attention that isn't trying to steer you anywhere — and to trust that you have the capacity to find your own understanding.
In practice, this means I don't direct the conversation, interpret your experiences for you, or arrive with a set of conclusions I'm working towards. The session is led by you. I follow where you take it.
There's a fuller explanation of how I work on the about page, and if you want to understand what a first session specifically looks like, this post covers it in detail.
Common questions about counselling
What is counselling?
A talking therapy where you work with a trained professional in a confidential space, exploring what's on your mind at whatever pace feels right. The aim is to help you understand yourself and your situation more clearly. It's not advice-giving — the counsellor helps you find your own answers.
Is counselling the same as therapy?
Mostly yes. The terms are used interchangeably by most people and most practitioners. Any distinction that exists is loose and inconsistent. What matters more is the practitioner's training, registration, and approach.
What is person-centred counselling?
An approach that treats you as the expert on your own experience. The counsellor provides warmth, honesty, and genuine non-judgmental attention, and trusts that you have the capacity to find your own understanding — rather than being directed towards conclusions the counsellor has already formed.
Do I have to have a serious problem to go to counselling?
No. People come to counselling for all kinds of reasons — specific difficulties, a vague sense something's off, a desire to understand themselves better, or something that happened a long time ago and never quite settled. You don't need to meet a threshold of distress before counselling is appropriate.