Counselling & Psychotherapy
Supporting you to navigate life’s up and downs, to identify and address the defenses that stop you from living your best life and to reach your true potential.
Nature Re-Connection
Walking alongside you as you explore your relationship to the natural world and (re)-establish your sense of connection to the web of life
You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Mary Oliver ‘Wild Geese’
Counselling & Psychotherapy
Life can feel hard – even overwhelming at times – but it doesn’t have to stay that way. Often, people find talking to someone who understands can help to shift difficult feelings and allow them to fully engage with life once more.
There are many reasons that people seek counselling and psychotherapy; perhaps you feel stuck? Perhaps you are anxious, angry, depressed, or in emotional pain? Maybe you notice your relationships are unsatisfactory, they always follow the same pattern? Or maybe life, with all its demands, is just grinding you down? Spending some time exploring these issues with a trained counsellor and psychotherapist can offer clarity, insight, and relief.
After an initial free 15-minute phone chat, our first session is an opportunity for you to explore your key issues, ask questions about the process and clarify what you want to get out of our time together. If it feels right to work together, we will contract for a period of time and review after 6-8 sessions. Some people will want to engage in short-term work, focusing on one key issue, whilst others might want to spend longer exploring their core issues and their emerging purpose in life. The choice is always yours.
I offer a safe, nurturing, confidential and compassionate space for you to explore your material. I take an integrative approach, pulling on many modalities to suit your individual need, and hold a Postgraduate Diploma in Psychosynthesis Counselling from The Psychosynthesis Trust. Find out more about Psychosynthesis here. I am a registered member of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), adhere to the BACP Ethics and am fully insured. Please read more about me and what clients have said about our work together.
About me
Hello, my name is Caitlyn McCarthy. I am an experienced and qualified counsellor and psychotherapist. I hold a Postgraduate Diploma in Psychosynthesis Counselling from The Psychosynthesis Trust, I am a member of the BACP and attend fortnightly clinical and peer-supervision to deepen my practice. As well as my own private practice based in Brighton & Hove and London, I have worked as an honorary therapist and continue to support practice sessions for trainee counsellors at The Psychosynthesis Trust and I also volunteer for RISE, a Brighton & Hove charity working to eradicate violence against women and girls. I have over twenty years of experience supporting survivors of abuse and people with multiple disadvantages; working both in the statutory and third sectors.
I am passionate about the benefits of therapy as it has been instrumental for me in navigating my own life’s challenges. I grew up with a parent with mental health issues and periodically struggled with anxiety, depression and low self-esteem myself. Walking alongside a warm, understanding and compassionate therapist, who was able to see my potential when it was lost to me and navigate me successfully through the quagmire, was pivotal. I hope I can do the same for you.
In 2011, I received a Winston Churchill Memorial Award to travel to the US to explore radical and innovative community responses to the issue of domestic abuse. I have a keen interest in mindfulness, Buddhism, yoga, somatic and trauma-informed practices, as well as ecotherapy and nature-based therapies. I am also fascinated by the power of imagination, creativity, and mythology in the pursuit of wholeness.
Through undertaking my own pilgrimage to feeling at home in the world; I whole-heartedly believe that anyone can achieve a sense of belonging. I look forward to walking alongside you for a while on your journey to re-connect to yourself and to the wider world.
