Mike Swift
Hello, I’m Mike – an individual and couples counsellor working in Bristol, Keynsham and online.
I imagine you have arrived here because you are experiencing some difficulty, stuckness or pain right now that is getting in the way of you feeling satisfied with your life. If we have supportive family and friends we may approach them for help, but sometimes that may not feel enough, or we may not feel able to talk to those around us about what’s really going on. Maybe this feels familiar?
It can be hard to reach out, I remember it well myself. My aim will be to support you right from the beginning of the process collaboratively, in ways that work for you.
What can I offer you? Well, I don’t claim to offer a cure for life’s inevitable pain and challenges, but I will try to make a space in which your feelings – all of them – are welcomed. I will engage with you in constructive conversations about your life and be an ally in your corner as we try to make sense of it together. Therapy is successful when, with the therapist’s help, you are able to find ways to grow and change that improve your life in ways that are both meaningful and tangible to you. Therapy can be a place to define what this is and what you need to do to get there. This involves becoming more aware of the relationship between the ways you feel, think, behave and experience yourself in the world. In my experience, therapy inevitably includes looking at your relationships with others in one form or another.
I welcome people from all walks of life including LGBTQIA+. I champion and celebrate the uniqueness of every person.
If you would like to meet, drop me a line for my availability. I always start with a full length session, which allows you to get a good overall sense of me and the way that I work.
Information for couples
I think it’s important to acknowledge that relationships are hard work. I imagine if you’re looking for couples counselling, things between you and your partner are not working in some sense. Perhaps the feelings you once had have changed. Perhaps this has built slowly over time, or a life transition or event has brought things to a head. Either way – something needs to change between you. Perhaps you’re at the stage where it’s either – things have to improve, or you separate. Commonly, the situation between a couple has reached crisis point by the time couples counselling is sought.
If your desire to stay together is still strong, and you are willing to work at it, my goal as a couples therapist is to notice and to intervene in the patterns and shapes that you are co-creating, to assist you as a couple to re-establish communication and empathy where it has broken down.
Often things from the past on both sides come up and end up intermingling in ways that get in the way of the relationship you want. Couples counselling can be a space to start exploring and unpicking these tangles and knots. This can be hard work, and will often require time and commitment to the process. My commitment is to be reliable, fully present and ‘in’ the process with you.
If you would both like to give it a go, I suggest that we meet for a full initial session in order to get a good sense of what it is like working together.
Online and/or telephone appointments are available.