Grief support in Stoke-on-trent

Based in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, Michael Batkin Counselling offers a safe and confidential space for deep therapeutic work. The service provides a comprehensive range of mental health supports, including psychotherapy and specialized trauma therapy. Core offerings include EMDR for processing difficult experiences, as well as group therapy and unique outdoor therapy sessions. Clients can seek help for a variety of issues such as depression, grief, addiction, and low self-esteem.

“It’s very difficult and sometimes rare to find a counsellor/ therapist who is the right fit. However I feel that the lady I was booked with was just who I needed for support at that time. I had my sessions with Claire Norbury (I hope she doesn’t mind me mentioning her name on here), who I’d actually seen for therapy coincidentally 10 years ago and I remember how comfortable she made me feel when I was suffering with severe anxiety following trauma, as a young adult. My recent experience of therapy began again last year with Claire and lasted almost a whole year, I think she tried her best to drag it out as long as possible for me as she knew how much I needed it and how much each session helped me, and also I have physical health conditions which meant I ended up missing a few sessions due to ill health and had to reschedule. Claire was also very understanding and empathetic about this and very patient when we had to reschedule or if I was running a few minutes late. She was just so down to earth and made me feel at ease, I also felt our personalities were a little similar which made a massive difference with understanding each other and communication. I could sometimes also just sit there in the session in complete silence (freezing) and unable to muster up words after off loading details of an event, and it didn’t feel awkward or uncomfortable. I just felt like I was in a safe space and could respond however felt right - silence, crying, blurting a load of words out not making sense, or struggling to get words out, or even sometimes laughing! And occasional humour within the session (when we both felt it was appropriate of course) actually helped ground me in the sessions and didn’t make them feel so wooden or clinical. I’ve had a lot of different complex traumatic experiences that we went through together and I unloaded A LOT. A lot of tears, a lot of deep personal, disturbing events that I went through, sometimes a lot of just rambling! I also have ADHD so obviously on top of everything else sometimes that made it hard to communicate what I wanted to get across and deal with everything just completely scattered in my brain (especially as I’m also unmediated with no support for it). So I want to thank Claire for always listening so intently and with my best interest, helping me digest and process a lot of things that had happened in the past, how it effects me today, how to deal with it going forward. Also helping guide me through the current difficulties I was facing in life as well as past traumas. I felt supported, listened to and validated in every session with Claire, as a therapist but also as a human. Thank you so much for helping me in my healing process. The work you do is invaluable and I am forever grateful. Sorry it’s taken months for me to write this but better late than never! And I also wanted to give hope to others struggling that there are therapists out there who are genuine people and care about you and what they do.”