Focused Short-Term Therapy with Trudie
Think therapists are all soothing voices and beige cardigans? Yeah, I really don’t fit that cliché.
Which works out well, because there isn’t really an “ideal therapy client” either.
Now we’ve got that out of the way, we can both relax.
People come to therapy for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes there’s one thing you can point at and say, that. That’s the thing I need help with.
Other times, nothing is obviously falling apart. You’re functioning, getting things done, probably looking reasonably convincing from the outside, but you keep getting caught in the same loops.
You overthink conversations long after everyone else has forgotten them. You say yes and immediately wish you’d said no. You worry about disappointing people, second-guess decisions, avoid things until they become much bigger things, or keep ending up in situations that feel suspiciously familiar.
Sometimes you even understand exactly what you’re doing and why. Which is particularly irritating when you still can’t seem to stop doing it.
That’s the kind of thing we can work with.
We’re not fixing your whole life in eight sessions. We’re getting properly stuck into one bit of it.
The idea is simple: we choose something that keeps getting in your way and we work on that.
Not your entire childhood. Not every relationship you’ve ever had. Not all of you.
One bit.
Across eight sessions, we’ll look at what keeps happening, what beliefs sit underneath it, what the pattern is doing for you, and what it’s costing you.
We might look at the rules you’ve absorbed about who you should be, the catastrophic “what ifs” your brain keeps producing, what you can actually control, the roles you fall into with other people, what your emotions are trying to tell you, or whether the life you’re living actually lines up with what matters to you.
There’s room for tangents, because you’re a human being and life rarely has the decency to stay neatly on topic.
But there is a thread.
And if we disappear too far down a side road, I’ll help us find our way back to it.
The aim isn’t to produce a shiny new version of you by session eight. It’s to help you understand the pattern better, notice it sooner, and have more choice about what you do next.
No miracle cure.
No personality overhaul.
No journalling in a meadow (unless that’s your thing – no judgement)
I am an Accredited Registrant with The National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society (MNCPS Acc.), with hundreds of client hours experience. More on my training/qualifications further down.
Properly qualified doesn’t mean predictable. If your idea of therapy is sitting across from someone very polished, very calm, asking “and how does that make you feel?” on a loop, that’s not really what happens here.
You’ll be sitting across from someone with brightly dyed hair, tattoos, Doc Martens, and a strong tendency to drop the odd F bomb. Click here to watch a video that will give you a real sense of who you will be working with.
And whatever you’re worried about saying, I promise you, I’ve probably heard something similar before, and I didn’t judge that person either.
Your thoughts aren’t as shocking as you think they are. And even if they were, my job is to help you make sense of them, not clutch my pearls.
Not that I wear pearls…
If you’ve had a bad experience of counselling before, you’re not alone.
Often it’s about the fit between two people. Sitting with someone who feels slightly out of sync, or performative, or like you have to edit yourself just to make the conversation work… that rarely helps anything meaningful unfold. That kind of mismatch can quietly shut things down before they’ve even started, because if you’re spending all your energy adjusting yourself to the therapist, there isn’t much left for anything else.
Sometimes it’s the way the therapy works, too. If you’ve previously found yourself wondering what you were supposed to be doing, where the sessions were going, or whether talking about the same thing for the sixth week running was actually getting you anywhere, a more focused way of working might suit you better.
You’ll still get space to think, talk, change direction and occasionally disappear down a tangent. We’ll just have a clearer idea of what we came here to do.
Got questions? Excellent.
Deciding to start therapy usually comes with a load of questions spinning around your head. Most of them you’ll be too polite (or too anxious) to actually ask me directly. So here’s the stuff people usually want to know but don’t always feel they can ask. The practical bits, the awkward bits, and the “am I even allowed to wonder this?” bits.
Practical Questions:
Sessions are 60 minutes.
£60 per session. Payment is due before each session (bank transfer or cash).
I don’t offer reduced rates – I keep my fee set at £60 to make my practice sustainable. I realise that’s not manageable for everyone. If cost is a barrier, it’s worth checking what’s available through the NHS or looking into low-cost counselling services in your area; some charities and training organisations offer therapy on a sliding scale.
The eight sessions are usually weekly. Partly because this is focused work, and partly because once we’ve got hold of a thread, I’d rather not spend three weeks putting it down and then trying to remember where we left it.
If something means we need to space sessions differently, we can talk about that.
That’s what I’m currently offering, yes.
It doesn’t mean I think every problem can be neatly resolved in eight hours, because humans have stubbornly refused to become that convenient. It means we agree on one area of focus, give it eight sessions of proper attention, and then stop and take stock.
By the end, you may feel you’ve made the change you wanted. You may understand the problem much better and have some useful ways of working with it. Or you may realise there’s something you want to explore in more depth elsewhere. All of those are perfectly legitimate outcomes.
I work from the old Assembly Rooms on the first floor of the Market Hall in central Chesterfield. I also see clients online, using Teams.
First thing we’ll do is have a quick chat, a phone or video call (about 10-15 minutes) to talk about what you’re looking for and whether I have availability. You can tell me a little about what’s going on and what you’re hoping to work on, and I can tell you whether I think this kind of focused therapy is likely to suit you. If it feels like a good fit, we’ll book in your first session. If I don’t have availability I can add you to my waiting list and let you know when a slot opens up.
Therapy Questions:
Mostly, we talk. But unlike completely open-ended therapy, there’s usually a clearer thread running through the session.
Some sessions will feel more conversational. Some will be more practical. Some may involve me saying, “Hang on, I think we’ve seen this pattern before.”
You don’t need to perform therapy properly. You don’t need to have an insight every week. You don’t need to arrive with something profound prepared. You just need to turn up and be willing to look at the thing with me.
It probably will, because human beings are inconveniently interconnected.
We won’t ignore it. But we also won’t automatically disappear down every rabbit hole we find. If something from your past helps us understand what’s happening now, we can look at it.
If it starts to become clear that you need deeper trauma work, long-term exploration or a different kind of support, I’ll be honest about that too. The point of this therapy is not to pretend the rest of your life doesn’t exist. It’s to stop every session becoming about all of it at once.
That’s fine. You don’t need to arrive with a beautifully polished therapy goal and a laminated action plan.
If all you know is:
“I keep doing this.”
“I’m fed up with this.”
“I know it’s not helping, but I don’t know how to stop.”
“I don’t really understand why this keeps happening.”
That’s enough to start.
Part of the first session is helping us work out what the thread actually is.
Then we’re not a good fit. It happens. Therapy is a bit like dating – sometimes the chemistry just isn’t there, and that’s nobody’s fault. If you’re not feeling it, tell me. I won’t be offended. I can help you find someone else who might be better suited to what you need. Equally, if I think someone else would be better placed to help you, I’ll be honest about that too. There is absolutely no prize for forcing a therapeutic relationship that doesn’t work.
You don’t need to be in crisis. If something keeps getting in your way, takes up far too much mental space, or makes your life harder than it needs to be, that’s enough reason to look at it.
Feelings aren’t compulsory. I’m much more interested in what’s actually going on for you than in making you label it accurately. Some people (especially neurodivergent people) find it challenging to identify or label emotions, and that’s okay – we can still do really good work.
It’s homework, Jim, but not as we know it.
You may leave with something to notice, think about, try, or experiment with between sessions. That might be as small as noticing when a certain thought shows up, pausing before automatically saying yes, or paying attention to what happens when you don’t immediately try to fix somebody else’s mood.
If you forget, avoid it, do it badly, or discover you hated the exercise, that is still useful information. This is therapy, not GCSE coursework.
Yes. What is said in the room stays in the room. The only exceptions are if you tell me something that suggests you or someone else is at serious risk of harm, or if I’m legally required to share information (which is incredibly rare). If I ever needed to break confidentiality, I’d talk to you about it first unless doing so would put someone in danger.
I also have regular supervision (all therapists do), where I talk about my work with another therapist to make sure I’m doing right by my clients. But I don’t use your name or identifying details.
No. I’m not a psychiatrist or a doctor. If you’re wondering whether you have ADHD, autism, depression, anxiety, or anything else that needs a formal diagnosis, you’d need to speak to your GP or a psychiatrist/psychologist to get that formally done. That said, we can absolutely work together on the impact these things have on your life, whether you have a diagnosis or not.
Let’s start a conversation
We’ll have a quick chat about what’s going on, what you’re hoping for, and whether this kind of focused, short-term therapy sounds like a good fit.
If it does and I don’t currently have a space, I can add you to my waiting list.
Too Much, Not Enough, and Everything In Between
You can spend a very long time thinking you’re “bad at life” before realising something else might be going on.
A lot of neurodivergent people arrive in therapy already exhausted from trying to explain themselves. Not just to other people, but to themselves too. Years of wondering why things seem harder than they “should” be, why everything takes so much effort,
why you feel simultaneously “too much” and “not enough”.
I try to create a space that feels real enough for people to stop masking so hard. I work in a way that leaves room for tangents, overthinking, unfinished thoughts, and the occasional complete mental blank. I’m neurodivergent too, so trust me, between us, there’s a fair chance at least one train of thought will leave the station unexpectedly.
In my experience that’s where the gold is.
A lot of the neurodivergent people I work with have spent years masking. Appearing capable. Functioning externally. Trying very hard to stay on top of things. Often at quite a significant internal cost. Sometimes what brings people to therapy isn’t crisis exactly. It’s the quieter realisation that life feels harder than it looks for everyone else…
That relationships feel confusing. That burnout keeps happening. That they’re constantly overthinking social interactions. That they can never quite switch off. That they feel emotionally overwhelmed by things other people seem able to brush past.
And then there’s the grief side of it. The grief of late recognition. Of looking back over your life with completely new context. Of wondering what might have been different if someone had noticed earlier.
I don’t provide diagnostic assessments, that’s the work of a clinical psychologist, not a therapist. But therapy can still be incredibly valuable whether you’re diagnosed, questioning, self-identifying, or simply exploring parts of yourself that are starting to make more sense. Because often the work isn’t about finding a label. It’s about understanding how you move through the world, what’s exhausting you, what you’ve adapted to survive, and what happens when you stop treating yourself like a problem to solve.
What you need to know about me:
I’m a qualified, accredited therapist, and my original training is in humanistic integrative therapy.
That basically means I don’t believe people are collections of symptoms that need correcting.
Most of the things you do make sense somewhere. The overthinking, the people-pleasing, the avoidance, the need to keep everyone happy, the habit of assuming responsibility for things that were never really yours in the first place. Usually, they developed for a reason.
My job is to help you understand what that reason might be, notice when the old pattern is running the show, and work out whether it still deserves quite so much authority.
I draw on lots of different therapeutic approaches, and I’m quite happy to borrow whatever is useful and leave the rest on the shelf. I won’t sit there nodding silently, and I won’t throw psychobabble at you.
I’m also unlikely to spend eight sessions asking, “And how does that make you feel?” in slightly different tones of voice. I’ll show up as a real person, with curiosity, warmth, humour, and a willingness to say what I’m noticing. Sometimes gently. Sometimes very gently. Sometimes with the diplomatic equivalent of, “Mate. Look what you’re doing again.”
If you want to get a flavour of me, press play on the right to watch a 3 minute video of me talking about therapy (and being my very authentic self!)
