The people here

Four therapists, and Mel on the phone.

Small enough that everybody here knows every family on the books, and that nobody gets handed between practitioners halfway through. If the person you start with is not right, we say so and change it.

Everyone here holds

Registration with BACP, UKCP, HCPC or AFT
An enhanced DBS check
Professional indemnity insurance
Regular clinical supervision

Ask to see any of it. Nobody will be offended.

Nobody here is real. The therapists below are invented. The names, biographies, registrations and qualifications are written to demonstrate how a real team page would read, and describe nobody.

Children aged 4–11

Ruth Ellery

Clinical lead · Child psychotherapist

UKCP registered · MA Child & Adolescent Psychotherapy

Ruth set Harbour up in 2016 after fourteen years in NHS child and adolescent services. She works mostly with younger children, which usually means working through play rather than conversation — sand, small figures, drawing, making things and knocking them down again. She is unhurried, and she is very good at explaining to parents what she is seeing without turning a child into a problem to be solved.

Ruth also holds the clinical governance for the centre and offers supervision to the wider team.

Young people aged 12–18

Sam Okonkwo

Counsellor for young people

MBACP (Accredited) · PG Dip Integrative Counselling

Sam works with teenagers, and only with teenagers. He is straightforward, hard to shock, and comfortable with silence. Sessions with Sam can happen in a room, on the two chairs by the window, or on a walk up the valley if sitting opposite someone feels like too much. He has worked in secondary schools and in a youth counselling service in Bristol.

Sam runs the free 20-minute first call for anyone aged 16 and over who gets in touch themselves.

Families, siblings, separated parents

Priya Raman

Systemic & family psychotherapist

AFT registered · MSc Systemic Psychotherapy

Priya works with whole families, parts of families, and families who are not quite sure they want to be in the same room. Her interest is in patterns rather than blame: what happens just before the argument, who ends up carrying what, and which conversations the family has learned to avoid. She works with separated parents and with step-families.

Priya offers evening appointments on Tuesdays and Wednesdays so that working parents can attend.

Parents and carers

Joanna Fielden

Parent consultation & therapeutic practitioner

MBACP · Dip Therapeutic Counselling · Video Interaction Guidance

Not every difficulty needs the child to have therapy. Joanna works with parents and carers on their own — sometimes for two or three sessions, sometimes longer. Foster carers, adoptive parents, kinship carers and parents of children waiting for an autism or ADHD assessment make up a good part of her week.

Joanna also runs our six-week evening group for parents of teenagers, twice a year.

Not a therapist

Mel Ashby

Practice coordinator

The person who answers the phone

Mel is who you speak to first. She is not a therapist and will not ask you clinical questions, but she has heard every version of "I am not sure if this is the right place" and she will not rush you. She also knows which of the rooms is warmest in January.

Matching

How we decide who you would see

It is not a rota. It happens on the first phone call and it is mostly about age, difficulty and fit.

Age first

Under about 11 goes to Ruth. Twelve to eighteen goes to Sam. Whole families go to Priya. Parents on their own go to Joanna. That covers most enquiries.

Then the difficulty

Bereavement, foster and adoptive families, separated parents, school refusal, or a child waiting for an assessment — each of us has areas we do more of, and we say so honestly.

Then preference

If a young person would rather see a woman, or a parent would rather not see someone their own age, say so. It is not rude and it is not unusual. Fit predicts outcome more reliably than technique.

If it is not working with your therapist

Tell them, if you can. Tell Mel, if you cannot. Moving to someone else in the building is an ordinary event here, it happens perhaps four or five times a year, and nobody takes offence. Staying with the wrong person out of politeness is the only genuinely wasteful option.

Behind the work

Every therapist here is supervised

Once a month, at least, each of us takes our work to an experienced supervisor outside this building and thinks about it out loud with somebody else. That is not remedial — it is a condition of registration for every therapist in the country and it is what keeps the work honest.

Your child’s name is not used. Ruth holds clinical governance for the centre and supervises the wider team internally as well.

We also meet as a group on Friday mornings, which is why the building is quieter then.

How we handle notes and records

Speak to one of them, free, for twenty minutes

The first call is with a therapist, not an administrator, and it is where the useful decisions actually get made.

Start a conversation See what happens first