Welcome to DeVernon Psychotherapy

I have just had my 5th session with Karen & I wanted to do a short recommendation of my experience so far. I say ‘short’ - because I can say it in one word. INCREDIBLE. Karen has been an absolute dream to work with for lots of reasons, but the biggest reason would probably be the fact that she did a full, complete & detailed holistic assessment at the start of our sessions & has then been able to identify areas I need support with. This might sound like an obvious thing to do - however, when you are struggling it’s hard to ‘see the wood for the trees’ & Karen has helped me navigate my thoughts. Karen is extremely professional & knowledgeable & explains things in a wonderful way. I was nervous to start therapy & reached out at a really low point. I wish I had considered private therapy sooner as it is really helping. Thank you Karen.

I came into therapy because I was really struggling with my social anxiety and struggled with things like leaving the house and going to school, but since therapy with Karen it has really changed the course of my life. I think ‘all teenagers should come to therapy’ because I feel so much more prepared for my upcoming GCSE’s and my future as a whole.

Therapy has helped to provide me with hope for the future through the realisation that I can get through what I am going through. I Also found that just talking over what had happened in the past to put me in this situation really helped with my image of myself. I found that this would put my mind at ease with things that the psychosis had made me paranoid about, as I knew that what I was thinking wasn’t real but being told that it’s just in my head helps a lot more. From this, I found therapy helped at basically picking my brain and finding out why certain thoughts even existed and how to eliminate the images I had of myself. This helped to cope with the situation, as I was starting to think that I had to end my life before therapy, as the thoughts of myself was getting that bad. 

I felt I had a good rapport with my therapist which made it easier to communicate comfortably.  Karen was sympathetic and a good listener.  

I felt that the therapy was broken up appropriately and that Karen made sure that I was understanding each part of it in connection to my formulation (which I had initially struggled to fully understand)

Karen scaffolded my learning by gradually reducing support appropriately by always asking me questions to gauge my understanding along the way plus to give me the opportunity to have my own ideas and decisions.  Karen is easy to talk to, sympathetic and a good listener I felt like we got on well which I think is really important when going through therapy/CBT.

I don’t think I would have found the confidence to keep going and push myself to just talk to people and get myself out there. I have found that this has massively helped with building new relationships. This is due to therapy making me no longer allow the psychosis to win and believe what it was telling me about myself. 

In the early sessions I had wondered if CBT would work much if at all for me but I do now feel it has worked well for me personally.  It was good to try out things that caused anxiety/issues whilst knowing that you were going to feed it back to someone trustworthy the following week and then work together in analysing connections to ways of thinking and also making connections as to why you may think/behave/feel the way you do.