Lindsay Noakes Counselling

Support for young people and adults

About Lindsay and the team

You can choose how you access our services, and what type of therapy you’d like to use. We offer face-to-face sessions in Romford, Essex, and London as well as online consultations.

Qualified for over 20 years
Experienced in working with young people, adults, and families
A lifelong learner
Skilled in working with neurodiversity
What are your qualities?

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LINDSAY – SENIOR INTEGRATIVE COUNSELLOR AND THERAPIST

I have been working in voluntary, private, and public services for over twenty years. Starting in East London with substance misusers, I continued to support young people and their families.

I moved into private practice in 2001 and have been working with all ages supporting people to overcome their emotional psychological barriers and empowering them to make a change.

Within my qualifications and experience, I use lots of different models to find the most effective way of supporting you and undergo continued professional development every year to maintain my good practice and keep abreast of new legislation and new approaches in the counselling and therapy community.

All this allows me to work with you as an individual and your needs to provide a bespoke package of support for you. Everyone has similar symptoms, but we all evolve from different circumstances and backgrounds so it is key to explore with you what is best and what we both feel with be helpful in the long term.

I have extensive experience and training in anxiety, stress management in the workplace or at home, bereavement, substance misuse, Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome, self-harm, and OCD amongst others.

I have also been involved in the education system for more than 20 years so feel confident to be able to support families and schools with issues that become a barrier to learning such as anxiety, anger, trauma, loss, grief, and family conflicts and separation.

I also have full training in safeguarding children from harm and have a full DBS check to reassure parents and carers of my safety to work with children and vulnerable adults.

Adult services include relationship difficulties to general anxiety conditions using educational models that you can take away an emotional toolkit for future reference.

SANDRA -COUNSELLOR AND PSYCHOTHERAPIST

My name is Sandra Duffield, I am a qualified psychotherapist and counsellor.

I offer long and short term counselling with a humanistic, mindful and integrative approach. I’ve worked with many adults across a diverse range of life issues. Creating an environment for being able to offload and be totally honest with yourself.

My aim is to offer a non-judgemental, therapeutic, safe and friendly space to be able to explore yourself and your current concerns. I offer a therapeutic relationship of trust in a language you can understand and confidentiality is a paramount to the successful counselling relationship.

I am available now to support you on your counselling journey.

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What can I help with?

One of the first questions I ask anyone who suffered from high levels of anxiety is, what do you know about anxiety?

Quite often we accept something without any knowledge about how or why it is there.

With knowledge and understanding anxiety can be named and tamed with amazing results that can be used time and time again.

Did you know that we all know how to manage anxiety?! if you have reached the age that you are whether that be 8 or 80! to get to that point you will have experienced anxiety but allowed yourself to be reassured, by other people and then yourself. What we need to do is show you how to reassure yourself again in the environment or situation that you are struggling with.

It has been called lots of different names in the years that I have worked with autism.

Autistic spectrum disorder, Autistic spectrum condition Asperger’s

The label for me is something that helps me understand some of the challenges/struggles/confusion that may be or have been present, but it can never show me as much as someone telling me how their symptoms affect them.

Whether you are 8 – 80 the neuro Diverge mind is unique to each and every person. There may be a cluster of similar struggles for people with ND but that only becomes present once I have built up a rapport with a client first.

I will always work with the symptoms that are creating barriers to the client and not society’s social norms.

I use lots of different techniques to work with a personal dialogue of difficulties and that can include sensory needs, intrusive thoughts, intense emotional expression or experience, social and communication development, and understanding.

Trauma is events that have created a physical survival response that may be appropriate or disproportionate to our environment or circumstances.

Working from the place of safety first and creating a secure relationship will allow you to progress with the events that have led you to this painful and unsettled world.

Trauma can extend from experiences we go through as children and yet we still remember our childhood as ‘okay’

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a physical response to a situation that the brain struggles to process.

Trauma can be experienced in lots of different ways and I have different strategies that will reduce painful symptoms that are related to the experience. They can involve speaking or taking a non-verbal approach which helps to move the event to a place in the mind that is more able to help process than react.

It is all done at your pace.

Excessive use of a product or substance that creates a behavioral or physical response to feel, need or want to continue.

This is not a rehabilitation unit – I am not in charge of your substance use

I can give you informed information that will allow you to discover the avenues that you used to reach the difficulties that you find yourself in with the product or substance.

Exploring conditioning attitudes and cultures linked to alcohol and drugs allows us to be aware of what choices we have now to make changes.

Motivation does not just appear when we need it, sometimes we need to see why it is relevant and then we find the determination to make more informed choices

What is Stress

Response to a situation that a person perceives to be overwhelming in that the person does not think that they can meet the demands of the situation

Stress = overestimation of a situation + underestimation of resources/resilience to deal with said situation

We all experience stressful situations, preparing for exams, preparing for a big event such as a wedding, moving home, or moving jobs. Add those to life and sometimes things can seem overwhelming.

This is a natural process but sometimes we need to learn how to reorganise things so we can see how we can regain some control and create some form of structure around the situation.

Coping strategies, problem-solving skills, and solution-focused thinking can help find some new avenues to pursue.

Nothing can prepare us for the passing of a loved one even when we are expecting it.

It is a natural cycle that we step into and it can be confusing and overbearing.

Whilst I cannot stop the pain, I can support you through this process and offer you some guidance about how it works and what to expect.

Sometimes we get stuck in a stage of grief that makes life difficult to manage and talking to someone who knows these stages has proven to be helpful.

Being able to talk to someone who is not emotionally involved in the grief has been shown to be helpful in working through the grief.

This work can happen just after the death or it can happen years later, there is no full stop when this support can be useful. It just depends on when you feel is the right time for you.

This can look like any number of things and some may be classified as abuse and some might be deemed as insignificant experiences but any adverse childhood experience can have lasting effects on us. It is not how ‘bad’ society deems it, it is how it affected us at the time that is important.

Friendship issues are a huge barrier to forming healthy relationships and sometimes it is seemed only natural to have these problems. They can be overlooked by the adults at the time and those feelings of rejection, abandonment, and hurt can get left unresolved or heard.

Likewise, abuse can be just as overlooked as it is such a difficult subject to speak about at the time or with family.

In counselling, you can speak openly and frankly about your experiences without fear or worry that you are going upset anyone or feel like the issue is ‘too small to be of worth.