Your First Psychotherapy

Your first psychotherapy session at the Bermondsey office

Most people arrive at a first psychotherapy session not quite knowing what to expect, and carrying a version of the question they have been sitting with for some time: whether this will actually be different. Whether the hour will feel useful, or exposing in the wrong way, or like a formality to be completed before something more significant begins.

At the Bermondsey practice, the first session is simply a conversation. It is not an assessment. It does not follow a protocol. It is an opportunity to speak about what has brought you here (at whatever level of detail feels manageable) and to sense whether this feels like the right place to continue.

What happens in the first session

The session is 50 minutes. You will not be asked to fill in forms beforehand or to follow a particular structure during the session itself. You can speak about what is most present for you (the immediate concern, the longer history, the feeling that something needs to change without yet being clear what) or you can ask questions about how the work proceeds and what to expect from ongoing sessions.

The therapist is there to listen carefully, to ask the questions that open things rather than close them, and to offer some initial sense of how the work might be structured. There is no expectation of disclosure beyond what feels appropriate at this early stage. The work moves at your pace.

What you are not obliged to do

You are not obliged to continue beyond the first session. The initial consultation is exactly that, a consultation. Some people find it clarifying enough to decide the work is right for them. Others need more than one conversation before that sense of fit becomes clear. Both are entirely normal, and neither is a problem.

Practical details

The Bermondsey office is accessible from SE1 and the surrounding South London areas. Sessions are available at times that accommodate working schedules. No referral is needed to book an initial consultation.

Finding the practice

The Bermondsey consulting rooms are on Spa Road in SE16, a few minutes from Bermondsey underground station on the Jubilee line and within easy reach of London Bridge. The street is quiet and residential, and the setting is deliberately understated. Most people are within fifteen minutes of the practice from anywhere on the Jubilee line through the City or Canary Wharf, which is part of why it suits working South East Londoners so well.

Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Doctorate of Professional Practice at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.

How the work is delivered from here

All international sessions are by secure video, in English or French. Online therapy is not a reduced version of consulting room work: it is the format that lets weekly work survive living abroad, travelling, or relocating. Sessions run in United Kingdom hours, which suits most regions, and if your time zone makes none of it workable, say so when you enquire rather than assuming it rules you out.

For clinicians and treatment services

Dr Jacquet supervises clinical teams in private residential addiction treatment and in a private psychiatric hospital. For treatment centres, psychiatric units and group practices looking for external clinical supervision, including in places where no supervisor of this seniority is available locally, team supervision is also delivered by video. For individual practitioners, see clinical supervision.