Louise Shepherd, BACP

Louise Shepherd is a counsellor with seven years of experience supporting people through stress, anxiety and major life changes. She focuses on clear, practical conversations that help people find their next steps. Louise uses a calm, steady style and aims to make sessions feel straightforward and purposeful.

Her main priority is to listen and help clients feel understood. She draws on Client-Centred Therapy to create space for people to tell their story in their own words. That approach is combined with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which helps identify unhelpful thinking and test new behaviours.

Louise also uses Mindfulness Therapy to help clients notice their thoughts and feelings without getting swept up by them. Motivational Interviewing is part of her toolkit when people want help making changes but feel unsure where to start. She can use psychodynamic ideas to look at patterns that repeat over time.

Sessions aim to be practical and tailored. Conversations may include short exercises, goal-setting, or simple experiments to try between meetings. The focus is on what feels doable right now, rather than on jargon or long explanations.

Louise works with concerns such as relationships, self-esteem, depression, trauma and coping with parenting pressures. She also supports people facing work stress, career questions, and compassion fatigue. She offers help for issues like communication problems, control issues, grief around separation, and questions about life purpose.

All sessions are delivered in English and take place online by video, phone, live chat or messaging. Louise is based in the United Kingdom and is registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, BACP.

How Louise’s approaches work online

Client-Centred Therapy focuses on listening with warmth and helping people lead the conversation. It is useful when someone needs to be heard and to make sense of their feelings. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at how thoughts, feelings and actions connect and offers small experiments to change unhelpful patterns. It is often helpful for anxiety, low mood and stress.

Finding the right approach is part of the work. Louise will collaborate with each person to choose methods that match their goals and preferences. That might mean starting with listening and then adding CBT exercises or mindfulness practices as needed.

Online formats make this flexible. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and shared exercises. Phone sessions are useful when bandwidth is limited or a camera is not wanted. Live chat and text messaging suit brief check-ins, written reflections, or people who prefer typing to speaking. These options help fit therapy around work, family and daily routines while keeping the focus on practical steps and steady progress.