how we work
Start with what your brain is doing.
Most approaches to feeling better ask you to try harder. Ours starts somewhere else: with what your brain is actually doing, and why trying harder has not worked.
The bit nobody explains
Your brain is not neutral. It is a prediction machine with one overriding job — keep you safe — and it is running on equipment that was finished long before open-plan offices, mortgages and group chats.
When it decides something is a threat, it stops asking your opinion. It hands control to the older, faster part of the system: the part that runs on pattern rather than argument. That part has three settings — anxiety, anger, avoidance — and it will pick one and commit.
This is why insight alone rarely fixes anything. You can know your fear of flying is irrational and still not get on the plane. The knowing happens in one part of the brain. The deciding happens in another, and that part does not read.
Rest
Not sleep exactly — the specific kind of settled, unthreatened state some call hypnosis, where the brain files what happened and lowers the alarm threshold. Most people under pressure have not had any for months.
Repetition
The brain learns what you do often, not what you intend. A new pattern practised badly for five minutes every day beats a perfect one done twice.
Rehearsal
What you rehearse, you get better at. Spend an hour a day rehearsing the disaster and you will become fluent in it. This therapy spends that hour rehearsing where you are going instead.
The three beats
first
Understand the pattern
A free consultation — in person or online. Not your average ‘discovery call’: you describe what’s happening, when it started, what it’s costing you, and what you want instead. We explain, in plain English, why it repeats — and we tell you honestly whether we’re the right people to help. Sometimes the honest answer is a GP, and we will say so.
Nothing is asked of you in this appointment. You leave with an explanation and a recording you can use whether or not you come back.
then
Practise the new one
Weekly sessions, usually around an hour. Each one opens the same way: a short plain-English recap of what your brain is doing — the explanation is part of the work, not the preamble — and then what went right since we last spoke. Not because we are determinedly cheerful or ignoring the issue, but because the brain finds what it is instructed to look for, and pointing it at evidence of progress is itself the intervention.
The second half is quieter. You sit still, you close your eyes if you want to, and we talk you into the settled state — the same one you drop into just before sleep, or twenty minutes into a long drive. Nothing is taken over and nothing is uncovered. It is the state in which the brain stops defending itself long enough to lay down a different pattern.
Between sessions there is a recording to listen to, usually last thing at night as you fall asleep. That is the part that stays the same week to week — it is how the settled state gets its daily repetition.
Alongside it there is normally one thing to carry into the week: sometimes a small daily habit, sometimes a single one-off step. You decide what it is, in the talking half of the session — homework written for you by somebody else is homework you will not do.
until
It stops needing you
The aim isn’t to manage it forever. It’s the week you notice you’ve stopped working on it — it becomes your new normal.
For most things, that’s eight to ten sessions. Some are quicker — a single straightforward phobia is often three or four. Some are longer, and where that’s likely we say so at the start rather than at session eight.
Common questions, answered plainly
- Am I asleep? Am I under someone’s control?
- No, and no. You are awake, you can hear everything, you can stop at any point and you will remember it. It is closer to being absorbed in a film than to being unconscious. Nobody can make you do anything you would not otherwise do, and nobody is going to try.
- Do I have to talk about the worst thing that happened?
- No. We work forwards. You can tell us as much or as little of the history as you want to, and the work does not depend on retelling it. Where something genuinely needs specialist trauma care, we’ll say so and help you find it.
- Online or in person?
- Both work. Online is not the compromise version — for any issues involving leaving the house, it is often the better starting point.
- What if I can’t relax?
- Almost everyone says this. It is a common opening line, and it has never once been a problem. You do not have to be good at relaxing; that’s the part we do.
What we are not
We are not a replacement for your GP, and we do not diagnose anything. We do not prescribe, and we will never suggest you change medication — that is a conversation with the person who prescribed it.
If you need help sooner than we can give it
We’re not an emergency service and we don’t monitor the inbox out of hours. Contact your GP, call 111, or contact the Samaritans free — any hour, any day. If someone’s life is at immediate risk, call 999.
111116 123999
Start with a free, in-depth first appointment.
You describe what’s going on; we tell you honestly whether we’re the right people to help.