Black Couples Counsellors in London, UK

Assessment, diagnosis and medicine sit outside counselling; ask who provides them where you are. Open the profiles below to compare experience, language, fee, and whether they work online. Ask how soon each one can see you.

If you are afraid of your partner, say so to the practitioner before any joint session is booked. Ask to be seen on your own first. The support numbers at the top of this page are for that situation.

Everyone on this page describes their work as counselling. A counsellor listens and helps you find your own solutions to problems ³.

The training emphasises the conversation itself. Sessions usually stay close to something happening now: a loss, a relationship, work, a decision. That focus is what most often separates counselling from longer psychotherapy.

A counsellor is not a medical doctor and does not prescribe or diagnose. Ask a counsellor what they work with, and for how long.

South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust Lambeth Talking Therapies. Phone +44 20 3228 6747. Talking Therapies care is free under the NHS. Adults aged 18 and older can refer themselves. You must live in Lambeth or have a Lambeth GP.

Usually. Partners are almost always seen together⁴. Couples sessions require safety.

Some practitioners will see one partner alone where the other will not attend. Ask what a practitioner does when one person is unwilling.

No. Couples counselling is for people in a relationship, married or not, of any gender, living together or not. The same practitioners work with couples deciding whether to separate, and with couples who have already separated and are parenting together. Say which of those describes you at first contact.

No. The work is with what happens between two people rather than with a verdict on either of them. Effective work with couples needs its own theories and methods, drawn from research on relationships. Ask a practitioner how they handle it when you disagree in the room.

Yes, and many practitioners offer it. Couples therapy by video shows few significant differences from face-to-face sessions⁵. Symptom reduction, engagement and the therapeutic alliance are comparable.

Sitting in the same room at home suits some couples and not others. Ask what a practitioner offers.

Each practitioner sets their own fee.

Some counselling is free. The NHS names treatment at another NHS service, an employer, a school or university, and a charity as the routes³.

In England, couple therapy for depression is one of the talking therapies NHS services deliver. Those services are free to patients, and a couple can refer themselves⁶. The NHS offers counselling for certain conditions rather than for relationship difficulty in general.

Where a practitioner states a fee on their listing, that figure is their own. Ask before the first session, and ask whether the fee is charged per session or per person in the room.

Couple therapy is an effective treatment for relationship distress, and the main models reach broadly similar results⁷.

In England the NHS commissions couple therapy for depression, on the strength of a NICE recommendation⁶.

Those findings describe groups of couples in studies. They are not a forecast about any one relationship, and nobody listed here can promise you an outcome.

What the research does not settle is which approach suits you. Ask a practitioner how they work with two people, and what they do when the two of you want different things.

Both partners usually attend together. The practitioner works with what happens between you, not with one person's account of it.

Practice differs on what comes first. Some approaches open with a formal assessment that combines joint and individual meetings. Others use no set assessment stage⁴.

Which route you take changes what you meet. Through an NHS talking therapies service in England the therapy comes from a set list, couple therapy for depression among it⁶. A practitioner you approach privately sets the shape of the work themselves.

Ask before you start whether the practitioner sees each partner alone. Ask what they do with what one partner tells them in private.

NHS talking therapies for anxiety and depression include couples therapy, where you and your partner talk to a therapist about problems in your relationship⁸.

You can refer yourself without seeing a GP, as long as a GP practice lists you and you meet the service's age rule. What you are offered depends on what you need it for and what your area provides.

There is no threshold you have to cross first. Relationship distress is one of the commonest reasons adults seek psychotherapy at all⁷.

Distress between partners travels. It is associated with mood, anxiety and substance-use difficulties in the partners themselves, and with difficulties for children in the household⁴.

Nobody has to send you. You can refer yourself to an NHS talking therapies service without speaking to a GP, and a practitioner you pay privately needs no referral either³.

Couples come with a repeating argument, with an affair, with a decision about whether to stay together, and with none of those. You do not have to agree on the problem before you make contact.

See the United Kingdom page for the professions that do carry a register there.