Relational
The quality of the therapeutic relationship matters. I offer a warm, honest and non-judgemental space in which all parts of you can gradually become speakable.
Psychotherapy in Forest Row & online
A place to meet yourself more fully.
Thoughtful, experienced psychotherapy for people seeking change, meaning and a deeper relationship with their own lives.
Begin a conversationTranspersonal & integrative
More than a set of symptoms.
I work with adults who are excited by—or at the very least interested in—the prospect of change, and who have not lost hope that their future can be different from their past.
A larger view of the person
Psychological, embodied—and open to the sacred.
I take the realities of distress seriously: relationships, personal and family history, the nervous system and the practical circumstances of a life all matter. But I do not believe that a person can always be adequately understood through symptoms, diagnoses or brain chemistry alone.
Human beings also seek meaning, belonging, imagination, love and a relationship with what is larger than the individual self. Therapy can make room for those dimensions without imposing a belief system or losing psychological ground.
What actually happens?
Two people, two chairs and fifty minutes.
You will usually do most of the talking. I will listen closely and comment when it may help us explore your thoughts, feelings, intuitions, dreams and bodily responses.
There is, of course, more to it than that. My training took five years, from 2004 to 2008, and, like other registered psychotherapists, I have undertaken substantial therapy of my own. It matters that the person opposite you has personal experience of the territory, not only theoretical knowledge.
My work is regularly supervised and held within the professional and ethical framework of UKCP (The UK Council for Psychotherapy). What we discuss is confidential, subject to the normal legal and safeguarding limits that I will explain at the outset.
MA (Cantab) · Dipl. Psych. · UKCP registered
About Simon
I am an experienced transpersonal psychotherapist. I began training in 2004 and qualified in 2008. My training is integrative, which means I do not impose one method or a “one-size-fits-all” explanation. The work develops around the particular person sitting with me.
I offer psychotherapy in Forest Row, East Sussex, and online. I work especially well with people who remain interested in the possibility of change—even when life has become painful, confusing or stuck.
“Transpersonal” loosely means spiritual, though I adhere to no particular spiritual tradition. I hold an overall view of people as more than just a bag of bones and chemicals, and I am comfortable exploring meaning, spirituality, unusual states of consciousness and experiences that may not fit neatly within conventional psychological language.
Simon Matthews
How I work
Depth, relationship and the wisdom of the body.
Therapy begins with careful attention to what is happening now. From there, we may encounter formative relationships, long-held defences, bodily responses, dreams, imagination and the larger questions that give a life meaning.
Integrative
I draw from psychodynamic, transpersonal, Jungian, attachment-based and trauma-informed traditions, adapting the work to the person rather than the person to a technique.
Embodied
Using principles from Somatic Experiencing, we can attend to the nervous system and help the body release imprints that insight alone may not reach.
Areas of particular experience
What may bring you here.
Relationships & attachment
Understanding recurring patterns of closeness, conflict, abandonment and belonging.
Depression, anxiety & loss of direction
Finding meaning and movement when life feels constricted, overwhelmed or empty.
Trauma & the autonomic nervous system
Working gently with protective responses held in both psyche and body.
Midlife & life transitions
Meeting crisis as a possible threshold into a more authentic stage of life.
Psychedelic integration
Making sense of challenging, healing or spiritually significant psychedelic experiences.
Spiritual & unusual experiences
A psychologically grounded space for experiences that transcend conventional categories.
Bipolar experience
Support that respects both the risks and the lived meaning of altered mood and perception.
Psychotic experiences
Careful integration of experiences that may have been frightening, disruptive or profound.
Therapy can become a place where the life you have lived meets the life that is still asking to be lived.
Beyond the consulting room
Wider work and writing.
My professional life has also included intensive group work, teaching and a long engagement with consciousness and transformational experience. These strands increasingly inform my writing and public contribution.
Psychedelic integration
Grounded therapeutic help to integrate experiences that may be healing, destabilising, revelatory—or all three at once.
The sacred in care
Contributing to discussion about how emerging psychedelic services can respect meaning, setting and the sacred while maintaining ethical and clinical rigour.
Writing & inquiry
Exploring consciousness, homecoming and how the insights of depth psychology can be made simple, humane and useful in ordinary life.
The practical side
Beginning therapy.
Our first contact is simply a chance to establish what you are looking for and whether I may be the right person to help. There is no expectation that you commit before we have spoken.
SessionsIndividual psychotherapy for adults
LocationForest Row, East Sussex, and online via Zoom
Duration50 minutes
Fee£125 per session; a limited number of concessionary places may be available
Professional bodyRegistered with the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP)
Get in touch
We can begin with a conversation.
If you would like to explore working together, you are welcome to telephone or email me. Please don’t include highly sensitive personal information in your first message.