Gram Davies – Counsellor Therapist

People come to therapy for very individual reasons, but it is not uncommon to feel your usual ways of coping are no longer working. For some, this follows a crisis or a significant loss, while for others it is because lifelong patterns begin to seem unhelpful. Perhaps a symptom, situation or type of relationship keeps coming up, holding you somewhere you don’t want to be?
Counselling and Psychotherapy allow you you to

• Speak and feel heard
• Discover new insights and opportunities within yourself
• Be able to notice, feel and live with more emotions
• Gain control and make meaningful experiences

My approach would suit someone who feels ready to have meaningful conversations about their experiences. This isn't the kind of therapy that uses set worksheets or protocols. Illuminating the habits of a lifetime is a gradual process. Although contemporary life can feel hurried or demand we take certain roles, in therapy there is chance to slow down and speak richly about the specific nature of the person you are. 

I try to remain sensitive to how individual identity sits alongside social belonging. Both can be precious to us, but also they can be sources of conflict or dilemma. 
I also appreciate how your desire for change can rub up against your need for stability, or by fearing you'll lose something fundamental to who you are. 
Whether this concerns sexuality, gender, spirituality, being a carer for a dependent — or anything else — it is only by respecting these complexities that we can reach a position which feels truly your own.
Wherever your experience hasn’t met with recognition, as can happen in contexts like living with disability, being neurodivergent, surviving abuse or dealing with political and environmental threat, I would especially welcome working with you. 
Therapy can become somewhere the specific, private and personal needn’t always stay silent.

I have helped people in personal suffering since 2020. I am registered with UKCP as a psychotherapeutic counsellor.

My original training was in integrative counselling, a mixed-modality approach, where I built my practice around humanistic-relational and psychodynamic-intersubjective methods. You could think of this as being interested in what it means to be a someone in a world of others, and also in how that which is often outside our capacity to speak of it may still have bearing on how we experience life.

Since qualifying, I have built on my way of working through comprehensive professional development. Firstly this involved some hundred hours practical study in interpersonal neurology, a way of thinking about how we embody what we think and feel.

I have gone on to inform my clinical presence along psychoanalytic lines, through a range of trainings use of supervision totaling hundreds more hours of continuing development.

Therapy begins with one or more preliminary sessions, where we may speak in order to clarify the nature of our work together. This will give plenty of chance to begin to tell your story, to ask any questions you might have, and to arrange the practical details of meeting regularly. 
Where it emerges that there are areas it would be helpful to expand into, we could then arrange to meet regularly on an ongoing basis for this purpose.
Sessions are 45-50mins long and take the form of a dialogue, where the things your bring to talk about can be given full attention. I don't give advice or strategies for particular situations. I will bring my awareness and observance to bear on what is discussed, letting you reflect in a way that will probably feel different to speaking with the people in your life or to thinking about things alone. 
If you struggle or have doubts about how to proceed in therapy, I will do my best to make the process feel possible to continue with together.