Online by video call · WhatsApp & Viber
Private therapy, counselling, relationship guidance and life coaching for individuals, couples and families — held entirely online, wherever you are.
Most people who get in touch have been managing on their own for a long time. You do not need a diagnosis, a referral, or the right words to start — only a willingness to say out loud what is going on, to someone whose whole attention is on understanding it.
Online sessions · First 15 minutes free
What we offer
Whether you come on your own, as a couple or as a whole family, the work begins in the same place: understanding the pattern you are caught in before trying to change it. Every service below is held online, by secure video call, wherever you are.
Time that belongs entirely to you, and someone alongside you while you work out what is actually going on.
People often come with
A room where both of you are genuinely heard, and where the same argument stops running on a loop.
People often come with
We work with the patterns between you, not with one person who has been labelled the problem.
People often come with
Forward-facing, practical work on direction, boundaries and the decisions you keep postponing.
People often come with
Our approach
No single therapeutic model fits every person or every problem, so we do not pretend to work from one. What happens instead is that the first two or three sessions are spent building a formulation with you — a shared, plain-English account of what is keeping the difficulty in place, written in your words rather than in clinical ones.
Everything after that follows from it. The formulation decides which approach is drawn on, it gives the work a direction rather than leaving it as a weekly conversation, and it gets revisited openly whenever it stops matching your experience. You are told what is being tried and why, every time.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
Works with the loop between what you think, how you then feel, and what you do next — including the avoidance and the small safety behaviours that quietly shrink a life. NICE recommends CBT as a first-line talking therapy for depression and for most anxiety disorders. It tends to earn its place when the difficulty has a recognisable shape: panic, health anxiety, sleep, a fear that has grown a set of rules around it.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
An established couples approach that treats most recurring arguments as something other than a disagreement about the dishwasher. Underneath the cycle, two people are usually reaching for reassurance in ways that land on the other as attack or as withdrawal. The work slows that cycle down, in the room, until each of you can hear what is actually being asked for.
Systemic family therapy
Works with the patterns of interaction between people rather than with one person designated as the identified patient. A teenager's behaviour, for instance, is looked at in the context of everything around it — a bereavement, a separation, a parent's own pressure, a change in who sleeps where — rather than treated as a fault located inside them.
Underneath all three sits a person-centred stance, which is less a technique than a precondition: you remain the authority on your own life, and nothing useful has ever happened in a room where someone felt judged.
Getting started
The unknown is the part most people dread. So here is the whole of it, from the first message to the point where you decide whether to carry on.
Send a short message through the booking form, or call. You do not have to explain everything, and you certainly do not have to explain it well — a line or two about what is going on, and when you are usually free, is plenty.
We reply within one working day.
Before you commit to anything, we speak briefly by phone. You can ask whatever you need to: how the sessions run, what happens to your notes, what it costs, whether we have worked with something like this before.
We will ask a little about what has brought you now, and whether this practice is the right fit. If it is not, we will say so and point you towards something better. There is no charge and no obligation.
Mostly listening. You will be asked what brought you now rather than a year ago, what you have already tried, and what you would like to be different — and then given room to answer without being hurried.
Nothing is compulsory. You decide what you say and when you say it. If you cry, that is completely ordinary here. If you would rather not, that is fine as well.
At the end we set out how we would propose to work, roughly what sort of timescale is realistic, and what would tell us both that it is helping. You then go away and think about it.
There is no minimum number of sessions and no package to buy up front. The work continues only for as long as it is useful to you, and ending well is treated as part of it.
Session fees, cancellation terms and the ways you can pay are set out in full, with nothing withheld until an enquiry has been made.
See fees and paymentThe working principle
Nobody arrives here broken. People arrive tired, or stuck, or carrying something they have never once been able to put down in front of another person.
Who we work with
Not diagnoses — the ordinary, heavy things that make a week hard. If what you are carrying is not on this list, it still counts, and you do not need a label to make an enquiry.
Family Restore is a planned, appointment-based practice. It is not a crisis service, there is no out-of-hours cover, and messages are not monitored overnight or at weekends. That limit is stated plainly because pretending otherwise would be dangerous.
If you need to speak to someone now, our urgent help page lists free UK services — several of them open twenty-four hours a day, every day.
Insights
Practical, non-promotional writing on the questions people ask most often in the weeks before they pick up the phone.
Choosing support
An honest comparison of coaching and therapy: history versus future, symptoms versus goals, UK regulation, and five questions that usually settle it.
Parents & families
Teenage anxiety often arrives as anger, stomach aches and avoidance rather than visible worry. Why reassurance backfires, and when to involve the GP or CAMHS.
Couples & relationships
Arguing is not the warning sign. Contempt, the pursue-and-withdraw loop and logistics-only conversation are. How to recognise them and when to seek help.
Common questions
The four things people ask most often. The rest — fees, notes, cancellations, what happens if it is not working — are answered in full on the FAQ page.
No. Private therapy is self-referral: you contact us directly, and nothing is added to your NHS record. You are welcome to tell your GP that you are having therapy, and in some circumstances we would encourage it, but that decision is entirely yours.
Most people do not know, and working it out on your own is not part of the job. As a rough guide: counselling usually centres on a present difficulty and how you are coping with it; therapy goes further into where a pattern came from and why it persists; coaching is forward-facing and practical, aimed at decisions, direction and goals rather than distress.
The free introductory call exists partly to sort this out. The boundary is not rigid either — work that begins as coaching sometimes turns into something deeper, and that is treated as useful information rather than a problem.
Yes, with narrow and legally required exceptions, and you are told what those are in writing before the first session rather than discovering them later. In brief: where there is a serious and immediate risk to your life or someone else's, where a child or vulnerable adult may be at risk of harm, or where a court orders disclosure.
Clinical work is also discussed in regular independent supervision, which is the standard safeguard across UK practice. Your supervisor is bound by the same confidentiality and does not need to know your name.
Every session is online, by secure video call on WhatsApp or Viber. It suits shift patterns, caring responsibilities, and anyone for whom the journey to a consulting room is the thing that would quietly stop them coming.
It works less well where there is no genuinely private space at home, or where significant risk is part of the picture. If online is not the right format for what you are bringing, we will say so rather than take the booking.
Get in touch
Nothing is owed by getting in touch. A short message, a phone call, or fifteen minutes on the phone before you decide anything at all — whichever of those is easiest today is the right one.
And if this turns out not to be the right time, or not the right practice, that is a perfectly reasonable conclusion to reach. We would rather point you somewhere more useful than take a booking that will not help. The door stays open either way.
Enquiries are answered within one working day.
Family Restore is not a crisis service and has no out-of-hours cover. If you need to speak to someone now, or you are worried about your own safety, free UK services are listed here — several of them open twenty-four hours a day.
