Theo Scheiner
Integrative Psychotherapeutic Counsellor
Graduate Diploma in Counselling
Therapists
Hello, I’m a psychotherapeutic counsellor offering counselling psychotherapy from a comfortable and easy to access consulting room in Central Hove. I've been in practice for 5 years, including in a community low-cost clinic, and a service supporting adults living with HIV. Prior to training as a therapist, I worked in the voluntary sector for 7 years supporting people leaving prison to reintegrate into the community. As well as my private practice, I work in the NHS as a mental health support coordinator with a wide range of patients, and presenting issues. People who know me would describe me as an independent thinker, with an easy-going and warm manner, a philosophical attitude towards life, and a good sense of humour.
Counselling offers you space to express emotional difficulties and distress in a sympathetic and supportive environment. You may want for all sorts of reasons to speak about your difficulties in confidence with a professional, and I will listen compassionately and without personal investment. I can also help you to assess your situation, gain new clarity and insight, and move forward in a direction that feels positive and hopeful. In addition to counselling, I am able to offer psychotherapeutic support, which is more geared towards looking at root causes of emotional and mental health challenges you might be struggling with. My approach here is integrative and relational, which brings together the best from a wide range of psychotherapeutic traditions and research, including attachment-based, psychodynamic, and contemporary somatic trauma therapies. This work tends to be slower, but deeper and longer-lasting in terms of symptom relief. The reality is whether we work together for a short, fixed period of time, or a longer, more open-ended one, I bring both of these together to help you sort out whatever you’re going through. The approach I take is first and foremost relational, which means I prioritise patterns of how you experience yourself in relationship with others. We do this together, looking at formative early relationships in your family of origin, present day relationships with the people around you, and using the here-and-now of the therapeutic relationship to join up the dots as we go. In this way, relational psychotherapy offers a very lively, felt process that generates powerful, experiential insight into yourself, and the more subconscious aspects of your mind. It can therefore also produce profound shifts in how you relate to yourself, your life, and the world around you. It will probably feel challenging at times, but it’s my job to make sure that it goes at a pace which is led by you, and supportive of your goals. Ultimately most clients I have worked with find that it has helped them to create more emotional freedom in their lives, to be more mindful and self-aware, find greater peace and stability within themselves, and to live more deeply, and with greater clarity of purpose.
I've always been in the helping professions, and started off running support services for people leaving prison. While in the criminal justice sector, I worked across arts education, family links, and eventually moved into forensic mental health. Beyound this, I have an academic background in sociology and politics, and take a keenly interest in the ways that our social experiences structure our psychic lives. Retraining as a psychotherapist at the Minster Centre in 2017, I focused on the role of unconscious forces in interpersonal psychology, how early attachment experiences conditions how we relate to ourselves and others, and on the embodied dimensions of psychological illness and healing.