Work is meant to take a fair share of your life — not most of it, and not most of you. If your job has started to leak into your sleep, your relationships and the person you are at the weekend, workplace counselling in Marlow can help you step back, see clearly, and decide what genuinely needs to change.
I'm Keeley Taverner, a Psychotherapist, BACP Accredited, work counsellor, and author of Why Love Hurts. Across 14 years in private practice I've supported managers, leaders, NHS staff, teachers, City professionals, freelancers and frontline workers through difficult colleagues, bullying bosses, restructures, redundancy, performance anxiety and the slow burn of being good at a job that's quietly grinding you down.
What is workplace counselling?
Workplace counselling is therapy whose focus is the working part of your life — your job, your role, your colleagues, your boss, your sense of who you are at work and what it's costing you to keep being that person.
It is independent and confidential. Unlike an EAP (Employee Assistance Programme) routed through your employer, working with me privately means nothing about your sessions — content, attendance, even the fact that we work together — is ever shared with HR, your line manager or your insurer. The whole conversation belongs to you.
This matters when you're working through something sensitive — a grievance you're considering, a bullying situation, a difficult relationship with a manager, or simply the realisation that the role you've worked hard to get is the thing making you unwell.
Signs you might benefit from workplace counselling
People who come to me for work-related therapy in Marlow often arrive with one or more of these:
- You dread Monday mornings — Sunday evenings have a knot in them
- A colleague or manager behaves in a way that leaves you doubting yourself
- You're working longer and longer hours and still feel behind
- You're being managed out, restructured or made redundant
- You're in a senior role and have nowhere honest to talk about it
- A return to work after parental leave, illness or bereavement isn't going how you hoped
- You're considering raising a grievance and want to think it through privately first
- You've started to feel that "this isn't me anymore"
None of these need to be at crisis point before therapy helps. Often it's the people who notice the warning signs early who avoid the full burnout at the other end of the road.
How workplace therapy for stress and burnout works
My approach is integrative — I'll draw on what fits your situation rather than running you through a fixed programme. In practice, work-focused sessions usually cover:
- The honest map — what's actually happening at work, who is doing what, and what your part in it is.
- The body and the diary — the physical cost of sustaining the current load, and where the stress is leaking out.
- Difficult conversations — what you'd like to say, to whom, and how. Rehearsal counts.
- The deeper question — what made over-working, over-tolerating, or staying silent feel safer than the alternative; and what changes when that pattern is named.
A career you've built can still be the thing that's costing you the most. Naming that is not disloyal — it is the beginning of doing something useful about it.
Bullying, difficult colleagues and toxic workplaces
Some workplaces are genuinely difficult — and some patterns of behaviour at work mirror what I see in toxic personal relationships: gaslighting, undermining, blame-shifting, isolation, and the slow erosion of your confidence. If that's what's been happening to you, therapy is a place to name it accurately and decide what to do — calmly, on your own terms.
Workplace therapist in Marlow & online — covering Buckinghamshire
I see clients in person at The Courtyard, 60 Station Road, Marlow SL7 1NX — a quiet, private space a short walk from Marlow town centre and easily reached from Bourne End, Maidenhead, High Wycombe, Henley-on-Thames and the surrounding Buckinghamshire villages. Many clients searching for a workplace therapist near me choose online workplace counselling by secure video instead — often the most practical option for remote, hybrid or busy professionals when counselling for work problems needs to fit around a working day. I also accept EAP referrals. Sessions are £250 and completely confidential.
The simplest first step is a free, no-pressure 30-minute consultation — a brief call to ask questions and see how it feels.
