Petina Walker, BACP

Petina Walker is a counsellor with 17 years' experience who practises from the United Kingdom. She is a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). Petina describes her work as client-led and aims to help people gain clarity and make steady changes in their lives.

Petina uses an integrative approach, drawing on attachment ideas, emotionally-focused work, client-centred principles and mindfulness. She blends these with motivational interviewing and solution-focused techniques to match what each person brings to a session. Sessions are tailored session by session rather than following a single fixed method.

Her background includes long experience in drugs and alcohol services, where she carried out assessments, brief interventions and ran group programmes. She also ran a wellbeing centre in Exeter for many years and has worked across therapy, training and community services. That practical experience informs how she plans and adapts support.

In practice Petina helps people talk through stress, anxiety, addictions, grief and depression, and addresses relationship and intimacy-related concerns. She also works with eating and sleeping problems, parenting strain, anger, self-esteem, career questions and life changes. Additional focuses include attachment and abandonment issues, body image, caregiver stress and codependency.

Petina describes her style as empathic and tuned-in, with an emphasis on listening and creating a holding space for difficult material. She aims to be practical and approachable, offering ways to manage distress while exploring underlying patterns. Her work tends to combine direct problem-solving with attention to emotional connection.

How therapeutic approaches work online

Attachment-based work looks at how early relationships shape current feelings and reactions, and helps people notice and change patterns that affect closeness and trust. Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT) focuses on identifying, naming and processing feelings to improve how people manage intense emotional moments. Client-centred therapy prioritises the person's own experience, with the counsellor offering empathic listening and acceptance to help the person find their own solutions.

Finding the right approach is part of the collaborative process. The therapist will discuss goals, preferences and what feels most helpful, and adapt techniques over time. Clients and the counsellor decide together whether to emphasise emotion work, attachment understanding or practical problem-solving in any given session.

Online sessions through video calls, phone, live chat or text messaging make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life. Video suits deeper emotional work when seeing facial cues helps. Phone calls can be a good option when bandwidth is limited or for a quick check-in. Live chat and text messaging work well for short updates, ongoing reflection and people who prefer writing their thoughts rather than speaking them.