Start with the title, not the website

Anyone in the UK can call themselves a therapist, a counsellor or a coach. Those words are not protected, and the training behind them ranges from a doctorate to a weekend. What is protected, by law, is a small set of titles regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council. Clinical Psychologist is one of them: it can only be used by someone who has completed an accredited clinical doctorate and remains on the HCPC register, accountable to published standards of competence, ethics and ongoing development. Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) is the British Psychological Society’s benchmark on top of that, reflecting doctoral-level training and a continuing commitment to the profession’s standards.

None of this guarantees a good fit. It guarantees a floor: training you can verify, ethics you can hold someone to, and a regulator you can go to if something is wrong. Checking a register takes thirty seconds and is the single most useful thing a prospective client can do.

Questions worth asking anyone you might work with

What is your training, and which register am I able to verify it on? What approach would you take with what I am bringing, and why? How will we both know whether the work is working? What happens if it is not the right fit? A good clinician will welcome all four questions. Hesitation around any of them tells you something.

The right therapy, not just the right therapist

Therapies are tools, not identities. The evidence is consistent that the relationship between you and your clinician predicts outcome at least as strongly as the brand of therapy used, and that the best practitioners fit the method to the person rather than the person to the method. That is why every engagement in my practice begins with assessment and a shared formulation: an account of what is happening and why, agreed between us, before any intervention is chosen.

A short glossary of the approaches I draw on

Primary modality

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing). An evidence-based approach, recommended by NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which produces evidence-based clinical guidance for the NHS) for post-traumatic stress, that works at the level of memory, the nervous system and the body. In my practice it is most often used preventatively, by people who are functioning well and want to resolve the experiences that still quietly shape confidence, reactions and self-worth.

Integrated approaches

• Narrative therapy: exploring and rewriting the stories that shape identity.
• Systemic approaches: understanding the relational and contextual forces at work.
• Psychodynamic approaches: working with unconscious processes, early experience and the therapeutic relationship.
• Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT): a time-limited, integrative approach to relational patterns.
• Schema Therapy: long-standing patterns rooted in early experience.
• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): evidence-based work with thoughts, feelings and behaviour in the present.
• Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT): balancing acceptance and change, with particular strength in emotion regulation.
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): psychological flexibility through acceptance, mindfulness and values-based action.
• Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT): building self-compassion and settling the threat system.
• Motivational Interviewing: a collaborative, client-led approach to change.
• Body-based and somatic approaches: working through the nervous system and body.

Group, community and organisational work

• PROSOCIAL facilitation: building cooperation and shared purpose in groups.
• Tree of Life: a narrative practice for identity, belonging and community, rooted in liberation-informed work.
• Schwartz-informed rounds: structured storytelling for the emotional and human dimensions of demanding work.
• REACT MH: evidence-based training in supportive wellbeing conversations for those with caring responsibility for teams.
• CISS: a brief, structured intervention for acute stress.
• Liberation psychology and community-informed frameworks: keeping the work culturally attuned and responsive to the whole person.

What actually matters

Verify the register. Ask the four questions. Then pay attention to the thing no credential can fake: whether you feel accurately understood in the first conversation. Credentials set the floor. That feeling is the signal.

You can verify my own registration with the HCPC here, read about what BPS Chartership represents.