@Spencer: None of the three counsellors I brought that approach to outwardly objected to me arriving with a to-do list, but the “vibe” was such that I felt one was less-comfortable with it than the others.

I used the BACP’s Therapist Directory to find potential therapists. For now at least, counselling in the UK is an unregulated profession, i.e. there’s absolutely nothing to stop absolutey anybody calling themselves a therapist/counsellor. Requiring that they’re registered with a professional body is a safer bet (BACP requires a level of qualification, ongoing development, insurance etc.).

I filtered potential therapists based on, among other things, theoretical basis. Unfortunatey doing that is probably beyond the reasonable reach of many folks (do you really want to read up on psychological theories before you even contact a counsellor!?). But in my case, because I had a bit of a grounding in advance, I was able to specify what I was looking for: a humanist/Rogerian basis felt essential to me, I don’t object to transactional analysis, I wanted nothing to do with psychoanalysis, for example.

This all came from the fact that I wanted to do my own heavy lifting; I just wanted an extra pair of hands. I didn’t want anybody to tell me what I was experiencing; I wanted somebody to get all Socratic on me and ask the tough questions until I found my own answers. Other people/situations may be different. But for me, I wanted very much to start from a metaphor that I heard long, long ago and love: psychological change is like moving furniture: a chair you can move by yourself; a bench you can move by yourself, but it helps to have somebody hold the other end for you; a piano you can’t move by yourself. I believed that the furniture I needed to move was of the “bench” variety, so what I really needed was the mental health equivalent of somebody to stand nearby and say “can you twist it this way? what if you brace it against the corner? to you… to me…”

I’ve emailed something like six different counsellors with an initial brief; I went on to have a 15-minute meeting with the three of them who got back to me positively (one got back to say they couldn’t help, another never replied, one replied but I didn’t like what they were saying); I went on to have an initial session with one of them, after which I suggested a further six sessions (and then did something similar again some time later).

That’s way more structured/planned than most people going into therapy, but it’s what worked for me, and it was an incredibly valuable process. I might well have another round in 2023, depending on how I get on with my “homework” in the meantime!