Madeleine Coates

In person and online therapy is held weekdays and evenings.

Counselling begins by examining the issues you are facing and helping to unravel what is going on for you.

I have availability for online sessions Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Please get in touch for further information by calling 07401 271240, emailing maddyrelate@gmail.com or via my website www.maddycoates.com/availability.

I am a Relate trained relationship therapist experienced in counselling couples and individuals. I can support you to improve communication, connections and relate to others in a way that establishes healthier relationships in many aspects of your life.

I support clients to deal with many issues such as  patterns of conflict, communication challenges, parental differences, feelings about roles and responsibilities, beliefs from childhood and the challenges of life stages. 

Experiencing life stages - career changes, becoming a parent, children leaving home and retiring are transformative life stages that can bring both welcome and unwelcome parts, I can help you process and address the changes you face. 

Personal history can lead to behaviours that many struggle to cope with. These can become intertwined in current or recent relationships and prevent achieving growth. I can support you through the process of unravelling the underlying issues and how to move on, including helping you work through any anxiety, low moods and negative thinking that can be a barrier to approaching aspects of your life in the way you want to.

Conflict can be a difficult obstacle to overcome for couples and individuals and I support them to examine a new way of relating and managing differences.  Differences can manifest as noisy and confrontational or silent and distant and I see many versions, each a unique blend of the individuals past and present experience of life coming together and creating their couples dynamic.

Infidelity or betrayals can be difficult to overcome or communicate on without support.  I can provide you with the space and opportunity to explore the impact of a betrayal and consider where to go next.

Separation is the right choice for some people but can be daunting, I help explore what has brought you to this decision and guide you through the stages. 

I listen to your story and from this I use systemic, psychodynamic and person centred methods to look at the ways in which you can work towards your goals such as improved communication, reducing rows, resolving parenting issues, recovering from a betrayal or loss, understanding repeated unhelpful behaviours.

Research shows that many life difficulties have a relationship breakdown as the origin and so by attending to your relationship you are looking after your future self.

An online 30 minutes session will be offered free of charge to enable you to explore if counselling with me feels like a suitable option for you. 

The first session is an assessment of your issues that you feel you face, a decision on the best help for you which could be couple counselling, individual counselling or recommendation to another service. The next steps include some goal setting to clarify what we are working on together and an outline of how we will review this.

This session will also set out the length and frequency of the sessions. Most commonly sessions are 50 minutes long but I do recognise that in some circumstances stories can be difficult to tell and that extended sessions may be necessary. An extended session is 75 minutes duration.