Sumeet | Registered Psychotherapist

Counselling and Psychotherapy Leighton Buzzard

The experience of coming for therapy is an opportunity for you to discover for the first (or subsequent) time in life that you can let go of all the judgements, the fear and hesitation, and begin to talk about what is bothering you. We become wounded within a sense of connectedness - in families, relationships, friendships and society - and paradoxically it is within a sense of connectedness that we can begin to heal. Healing the emotional brain takes time, but it is a creative and deeply fulfilling process that brings wonderful gifts with itself. 

I offer Individual Psychotherapy and Couples Counselling.

Individual Psychotherapy

What often brings clients to individual psychotherapy is a sense of conflict within their relationships or within themselves or unresolved trauma, along with the desire for the suffering either to be resolved or to be made meaning of. I believe that there is no such thing as 'fixing' people or a 'fix' for things. The goal of therapy is to become more conscious of all that happens within an individual and within their relationships, so that from this new sense of becoming awakened, a person can make choices to change the course of their lives.

More often than not, there are no ready-made answers to the specific suffering of someone's life, but the effort lies in being open to discovering the answer that would naturally arise from you, out of your own inherent wisdom that you perhaps are not yet able to see. From experience, the more sincere the effort you put into this process with openness, the more you get something in return, but it all happens at a steady pace that doesn't overwhlem you.

Psychotherapy can feel like an unfamiliar setting because the therapeutic conversation is not like any social conversation; but this is precisely why psychotherapy works - because we get to look at the mind in ways that are driven by curiosity, compassion and wisdom rather than habitual approaches.

My professional area of interest is in working with individuals who suffer from: Anxiety, Trauma, PTSD, Low Self-esteem, Inter-personal Relational Issues, Work-Related Stress, Difficulty Accepting one's Sexuality. I provide a warm and welcoming space to LGBT clients and gay men. I also welcome the use of arts and creativity in the process of psychotherapy, and I offer sandplay therapy for trauma survivors. 

Couples Counselling
People often come to relationship therapy when there is a lot that they have tried amongst themselves, and nothing seems to work to make two people understand each other.

The type of psychotherapy I offer aims to facilitate a space for you so that you can get a deeper understanding of what happens within the unspoken space between both of you, and how your individual life histories - more often than not - continue to play a role in influencing how you relate to each other. My focus in relationship psychotherapy is twofold: to understand how your past shapes your present, and to understand what is happening between both of you in the here and now. 

Lastly, relationship therapy invites two individuals to open up the vulnerable parts of themselves to their partner in the guiding presence of a psychotherapist, in order to relate to the other person from a different place than a habitual one. 

First Session & Subsequent Appointments

Couples Psychotherapy: All sessions last for 60 minutes. Before our first appointment, I will send both of you a detailed relationship therapy questionnaire to fill in, which will give me a deeper understanding of what has brought you to therapy.

Individual Psychotherapy: Initial Assessment Session lasts for 55 minutes, and is a structured appointment with a set of questions that I go through with you in order to understand you and your life history at a deeper level. All subsequent sessions last for exactly 50 minutes.

Psychiatric Conditions Not Covered

At present I do not offer psychotherapy for new clients with a diagnosis of, or signs of, personality disorders at my private practice. However, I do welcome enquiries from former clients with an existing personality disorder diagnosis. 

More About Me

Prior to training as a psychotherapist, I have had a wide exposure in life: I studied a master’s degree in engineering, worked in financial services for a decade, authored three books of poetry, wrote art and book reviews, been a member of a few international arts and conflict transformation NGOs, and read Buddhist philosophy for fifteen years. I speak English, Hindi and Dutch, and have a keen interest in Dutch art and culture.