±«ÓãÊÓƵ

I work Mondays and Tuesdays, from 7am to 7pm.

You don't have to know what to call it before you get in touch. Most people arrive with something that isn't sitting right and can't yet say what it is.

What tends to change is often not the thing people came in wanting rid of. Anxiety and grief are the common ones, though it can be almost anything. They arrive feeling like intruders, and a great deal of energy goes into keeping them at bay. What often becomes clear instead is that they are part of you and doing something on your behalf, usually to do with keeping you safe. Once that lands the fighting can stop, and what people notice first is the energy coming back. They describe feeling more themselves rather than less troubled.

People also tend to find they trust their own reading of things more than they did. A good deal of difficulty involves living by a standard set somewhere else and long ago, and what an hour like this does is give your own sense of what matters somewhere to be heard, until it becomes the thing you steer by again.

I'm Gary Keene. I came to this after thirty years leading technology teams, so I know the weight of being the one others rely on. I've had my own losses too, which is the other half of why I do this work now.

Mostly what I do is listen, and I'll let a silence run rather than filling it, which is usually when something arrives. I'll ask when I haven't understood rather than assume I have.

I hold a BSc in pluralistic person-centred counselling from Middlesex University and a postgraduate diploma in Gestalt therapy from London Metropolitan University. In practice that means no method gets applied to you: what we do is agreed between us and revisited as we go.

People often stay in therapy longer than is useful, because it feels rude to say it has stopped helping. You won't have to raise that. I'll ask, more than once, and I'd far rather be told early than late.

People come to me with all sorts of things. Often it's grief, bereavement, or the end of something: a relationship, a marriage, a job, a way of living that has stopped being available. Often it's stress and burnout, or depression and low mood put down to circumstance too long. Sometimes it's low self-esteem, confidence, or the perfectionism that never lets anything be finished. Relationship and family difficulty is common ground too.

Anxiety often has no obvious object: a dread on waking, a body braced for something it can't name. People frequently describe two problems rather than one, the anxiety itself and the small avoidances built up to keep it at bay, each sensible on the day, which have quietly narrowed the week.

Work brings a lot of people here: redundancy, a role that has changed shape under you, a decision you keep circling, or the tiredness of being the person everyone brings things to.

Some of what people bring has roots in frightening experiences. I work in a trauma-informed way: going at your pace, checking rather than assuming, and treating your own sense of what's safe to look at as the guide.

I see adults of any age, one to one. I don't work with couples or families together in the room.

Sessions are fifty minutes, usually weekly, for as long or short a time as is useful.

I work in three ways: in person in Kingston upon Thames, easily reached from Surbiton, New Malden and Richmond; online across the UK; and walking therapy in Richmond Park, for people who find it easier to talk side by side and outdoors than face to face in a room.

If you're autistic or have ADHD, I don't offer assessment or diagnosis and wouldn't call myself a specialist. What I'd want to get right early is the pace, the amount of silence, and how plainly things are said, and I'd rather ask than assume.

Counselling is £70 for a fifty-minute session, with a small number of concessionary places. I also offer therapeutic coaching at the same rate when booked privately.

My first session is different from the rest, and it's free.

Before any regular counselling I suggest a short conversation of around twenty minutes, at no cost. It comes first, always. You get in touch, I reply within one working day and suggest a time or two, and we talk, by phone or video, whichever you'd rather.

There's nothing to prepare and no need to explain everything. You don't have to have it worked out, or know what to call it, or arrive with a tidy account of what's wrong. If you arrive and can't think of anything to say, that isn't a wasted conversation and it happens often. We can start from the not knowing, which is usually more useful than it sounds.

It's mostly a chance for us both to get a sense of one another, since who you sit with tends to matter more than any particular method. We can talk a little about what has brought you, and about how you'd prefer we went about things. You're welcome to ask me anything: about fees, confidentiality, my training, how I work, or what happens if it turns out not to be helping.

You can't really tell from a written profile whether someone is right for you, and I'd be wary of anyone who suggested you could. That's what this conversation is for, and it's entirely reasonable to treat it as an interview rather than a first session.

Nothing is booked and nothing is paid for until after we've spoken. At the end you're free to think it over, or to decide I'm not the right person for you. If that's how it lands, I'd be glad to suggest some alternatives rather than leave you to start again from nothing.

If we do go ahead, the first full session is fifty minutes like any other. We start wherever you want to start, which is sometimes the thing you came in with and often something underneath it.

Anything you tell me when you enquire is used only to reply to you, and is held securely. There's a full privacy notice on my website.