Alev Butun, BACP

Alev Butun is a counsellor based in the United Kingdom with eight years of professional experience. She focuses on helping people manage stress, anxiety and depression. She also supports clients affected by trauma, abuse and addictions, and those struggling with self-esteem or life changes.

Her approach is warm and respectful. She adapts conversations to each person's needs and aims to create a steady, non-judgemental space for talking. Alev places emphasis on understanding what matters to the client and building from there.

In sessions she uses client-centred methods to prioritise the person’s own goals and perspectives. Mindfulness techniques are introduced to help with overwhelming emotions and to build everyday coping skills. She also draws on psychodynamic ideas to look at patterns that repeat across relationships and life choices.

Alev works with issues such as grief, intimacy concerns, parenting strain and career stress. She also addresses codependency, communication problems, control issues and feelings of emptiness or shame. Immigration-related adjustment, isolation and young adult concerns are within her remit as well.

Her style is practical and conversational. She offers tools you can use between sessions alongside reflective exploration. If someone is ready to start, she guides them through the first steps and helps set clear goals for therapy.

How these approaches translate to online therapy

Alev uses client-centred work to start from each person’s own goals and experiences. This approach focuses on attentive listening and reflecting back what matters to the client, which helps shape practical steps and priorities during sessions.

She also incorporates mindfulness techniques to build simple daily coping tools. These exercises can be practised between sessions and are easy to teach over video or text, helping with anxiety, stress and mood regulation.

Psychodynamic ideas are used to notice repeating patterns in relationships and behaviour. Talking through these patterns online can reveal long-standing themes that affect decisions and emotions, and helps people make different choices going forward.

Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. She will discuss options and adapt methods to fit the person’s needs, goals and preferences rather than imposing a single style. Clients and the therapist decide together what feels most helpful as work progresses.

Online formats offer practical benefits for many people. Video calls are closest to face-to-face and work well for deep conversations, while phone sessions need less bandwidth and can be easier to fit into a busy day. Live chat and text messaging suit brief check-ins, ongoing support and people who prefer writing to talking. These options increase flexibility and make it easier to keep therapy consistent alongside daily life.