Your path to better relationships and individual wellbeing 

What continues to strike us, after many years of this work, is not how often people are defeated by difficulty — but how reliably they are not. The capacity to move through hard things, and to be genuinely altered by them, is one of the most consistent features of human experience. It is also one of the least well understood.

Much of what limits us is not visible to us. Fear, shame, the quiet conviction that we are somehow less than others, the patterns we learned early and never thought to question — these accumulate beneath ordinary awareness and exert a steady pressure on the choices we make and the lives we end up living. They operate without our permission, often without our knowledge, and they account for a great deal of the stuckness that brings people to therapy.

The work of counselling and psychotherapy is, in part, the work of bringing these influences into view. Coaching extends this into action: a steady, considered engagement with the thoughts and reactions that have been quietly running the show. Once the unseen becomes seen, and once the reasons for old patterns become understood rather than merely endured, something genuinely shifts. The difficulty does not always disappear — but the relationship to it changes, and with that change comes room to move.

This is the kind of transformation we are here to support, in whatever form it takes for you. The areas that follow below — from couples therapy and trauma treatment to neurodivergent counselling, addiction, and support around eating disorders — are the shapes this work most often takes in practice. You may find that one of them names something you have been carrying.

Claire Sainsbury BSc MA MBACP (Accred)

Co-Founder and Lead Therapist - The Hove Counselling Practice

The lead therapist, Claire Sainsbury, holds a BSc in Psychology, a Master of Arts in Counselling and Psychotherapy Practice as well as an Advanced Postgraduate Diploma in Integrative Counselling and Therapy. She has also undertaken further specialist training in the following areas:
(i) Working with Couples - this training in relationship counselling and emotionally focussed therapy involves the key dynamics that are influencing a couple as well as communications skills to better manage conflict and intimacy,
(ii) Trauma Treatment EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) in which Claire is an Advanced Level 3 Certified Practitioner,
(iii) Eating Disorders - Claire is qualified as a Master Practitioner offering specific approaches to treat Anorexia, Bulimia, Binge Eating Disorder and Over-eating,
(iv) CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) - useful techniques to challenge unhelpful habits and promote change,
(v) DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy) - skills specifically designed to help people suffering with emotional instability. Claire is a tutor of DBT at a London College.

Claire Sainsbury BSc MA MBACP (Accred)

Most people who eventually pick up the phone have been thinking about it for some while. The hesitation is not weakness; it is often the very pattern that has brought them here in the first place — the careful self-management, the quiet sense that things ought to be handled alone, the wondering whether what they are carrying is significant enough to warrant the call.

If something on this page has named an experience you recognise, you are welcome to make contact whenever the moment feels right. There is no requirement to arrive with the right words, a clinical label, or a clear sense of what you want to change. Many of the conversations we have begin precisely with not-quite-knowing — and finding the language for what is actually happening is part of the work itself.

Every enquiry that reaches us is read first by Claire Sainsbury, the practice lead, who will reflect on what you have shared and consider the therapeutic approach most likely to serve your particular situation. This is rarely a matter of slotting people into pre-existing categories; more often it is a quiet weighing of what is being asked for, what might help, and who within the practice is best placed to walk alongside you.

In some instances, the work that would most benefit you sits outside Claire's own areas of clinical focus. When that is the case, you will be introduced to one of the specialist practitioners who hold particular expertise in their own fields: Sandra Street, who offers bereavement and family therapy; Paul Rapley, whose work centres on long-term addiction; and Christine Wesson, who practises hypnotherapy. The intention behind these onward introductions is straightforward — that the person you eventually sit with is genuinely the right person for the work in front of you, rather than simply the first one available.

The team at the Hove Counselling Practice brings considerable breadth across individual, couples, and specialist work, and we would be glad to listen. If you would like support, we invite you to send a brief message with the form below, call 07947 073298 or book an initial conversation — whichever feels least demanding. The first contact carries no expectation of what comes next.

We're here when you are ready.

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