Julie Webb MA; MBACP (Accr’d) Counselling, Psychotherapy & Coaching
in Cambridge

Hello! You are here, and that means that you are already stepping into a fertile environment for clarity, psychological healing and change. Engaging in any kind of therapy, coaching or change work is an opportunity to be critically reflective in an atmosphere of warmth, compassion and understanding: a confidential space where the focus is upon you, your dilemma, distress, or whatever it is that is impacting your sense of wellbeing right now; a space to explore your triggers and motives, hopes, dreams and desires and find a way to connect with what really matters to you so that you can go forward.

I am a BACP registered, accredited counsellor and psychotherapist with over 10years experience in aiding people through the struggles that life throws up for us. I have worked in NHS, University and private practice settings. I am also currently part of the counselling & wellbeing team at Anglia Ruskin University and a tutor at The Institute of Continuing Education at Cambridge University. Bringing together my training as a counsellor and psychotherapist, experience as a personal development trainer & life-coach, and studies in philosophy and therapy, I offer a kind of one-to-one personal consultancy, exploring any dilemmas and challenges that you may experiencing right now, how you may have got here and providing the opportunity for you to go as deep as you wish in order to make changes.

Choosing a counsellor or therapist can be a daunting task. There are so many modalities and personalities to choose from, but I trust that you have everything you need to get through whatever it is that is troubling you. You have the capacity to dig deep, explore and investigate. Therapy offers you the opportunity to do just that in a confidential space with an educated, trained, registered and ethically grounded practitioner. The therapeutic relationship itself creates a fertile territory within which to explore yourself, and as we work together my job is to not get in your way, in the way that perhaps a family member, partner or friend may inadvertently do.

Therapy is about aiding you to find a way through your predicament whether that be dealing with anxiety, low mood, depression, bereavement, separation/divorce, challenging relational dynamics in friendships or working relationships, ill health, major life changes, or sexuality etc. If you’re here reading this, I suspect your path has got a little muddy, your waters a little murky, and your thoughts a little muddled. Maybe everything feels a lot muddy, murky and muddled. But you’re here reading this – what is that already telling you about yourself? That you already have a sense that you need/want something to change – you are already listening to yourself and doing something about it that's what!

Clients across the generations, from a struggling student to a stressed-out executive have sought to work with their own change process and explore the nature of who they are and how they wish life to be. My work is open to anyone over the age of 18years who is struggling with life at the moment. I can also work with clients via their employer insurance companies: Vitality, Aviva, Aetna, WPA, and AXA.

Couples therapy can provide invaluable insight into the workings of your relationship, whether familial, friendship, romantic, marriage, heterosexual or same sex. How we relate to one another has a profound impact on our wellbeing and function in the world and choosing the option to look at it more deeply is a courageous step. Couples come to counselling for all kinds of reasons and do not have to wait until crisis point of staying or leaving is reached. Couples counselling is offered to any couple wishing to take a deep look at their relationship and its workings.

Whilst the past necessarily influences the present, my approach with couples is to work in the here and now and explore the intricate dynamic between you such as - what habits of relating do you have individually and together? What patterns have you fallen into? What matters to you most? How do you hear one another? Where are you not hearing? What do you want from each other? What are you experiencing in your body as you relate to each other? These are all possible questions that may be implicit if you choose to embark upon couples counselling, and I look forward to exploring with you whatever seems difficult in your relationship right now.

Supervision is a necessary, valuable and intrinsic part of our work as therapists. I value a supportive and encouraging relationship as a supervisor so that I can best aid you in your work to aid clients through their own change process in a safe and professional manner. I offer clinical supervision to counsellors and psychotherapists, and also to anyone, in any profession wishing to engage in a supervisory reflective practice and have worked with teachers, occupational health therapists and speech therapists. Click here for more details.

To aid your change process I offer what can be described as active relaxation or creative visualisation which is derived from my training in cognitive hypnotherapy, a variety of meditation practices and yoga nidra. Used in the context of addressing specific stress-related issues, anxiety and fear, this type of active relaxation is about creative visualisation and positive affirmation, and is goal specific.

The number of sessions is entirely in your power. Sometimes one session is enough to ignite something for you. For counselling some clients find that 10 sessions are enough to address their concern and find a way through. Others find 20-30 sessions of psychotherapy is of help to identify and address more ingrained issues and habits that seem to impede their life somehow. There are other clients that see this work as a personal development consultancy and use the work as part of their own self-care and development long term and we can find ourselves working together for a year or more. I tend to work in an open-ended manner and do not fix you to a time-frame so that you can flexible and get what you need, when you need it.

I am always open to discussion about tailor-made longer sessions if this is something that you are interested in, and fees will be adjusted accordingly.

However you choose to work with me know that you are undertaking a serious commitment to yourself and your life.

As a Counselling Lecturer and Trainer I have extensive experience in training counsellors and aiding them through their own journey of self-awareness and personal development. I have taught on all levels of training programs and facilitated large groups in personal development workshops and therapeutic group process. I am currently a registered tutor with Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education and teach on a variety of programmes.

As a therapist and writer, I work with other writers to aid character development for their novels and short stories. This work can help with stuckness when writing and can aid with the development of plot, story and especially dialogue. Combining my education and experience in the philosophical and the psychotherapeutic field, our dialogue will naturally lead to exploring what it is to be human at a deeper level, what matters to your character as an individual, as part of a relationship or group, as a gendered, political, and emotionally fragile being. This encounter provides an opportunity to examine all the experiential tensions that your character may be holding just by virtue of existing - in fact tensions that we all hold as human beings.

Fictional characters must appear real and believable for your reader to invest in them. Engagement in a session like this can help you really tap into the inner life of your character:

You can book a one-off hour long session for your character. I don't need to know any details up front about your creation. This makes it a more authentic experience for you and your character. You can arrive as him or her with whatever the character would like to talk about. The first ten minutes will be about you and I settling in and me explaining how I work. We will then get into session and I will work with your character for the remaining fifty minutes, in the here and now, in an authentic manner so you can tap into the character in an experiential way. You are free to record the session so that you can replay the dialogue and/or transcribe for further development.

I strongly advise transcribing the session afterwards as you will really get to know your character and feel them as you write. As you transcribe, other details and ideas will naturally come to you for further exploration and development.

Experience
I began my early career in the NHS as a Personal Development Trainer, followed by starting my own company in training and marketing. After a career break to establish my family and undertake academic study and research, I worked as an independent Philosophical Counsellor and Life Coach and this work still underpins my practice as a counsellor and psychotherapist. As a Counsellor I have worked with clients in an NHS GP Medical setting and established a substantial private practice in Shrewsbury before relocating to Cambridge in 2015. I have worked with insurance companies to support clients referred from EAP schemes and Occupational Health departments. I am also part of counselling & wellbeing team at Anglia Ruskin University.

As a counselling lecturer, I have taught counselling/therapy to qualified practitioner and degree level, and have delivered CPD workshops in Philosophy for Therapists and Trainees. I am currently teach at Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education and teach on a variety of courses that run at Madingley Hall.

I am also a writer and have published reviews and articles in Self & Society (journal for humanistic psychology), The Journal for Existential Analysis (SEA), the journal for Person-Centered Experiential Psychotherapies (PCEP), and I have recently co-written and co-edited with Manu Bazzano, a collection of essays about philosophy and therapy - Therapy and the Counter-Tradition: The Edge of Philosophy (2016) published by Routledge (see sidebar for details) and contributed in Re-visioning Person-Centred Therapy: Theory and Practice of a Radical Paradigm (2018). My new book Fifty Minutes will be published May/June 2020.