About Us

Marches Counselling Service has been an independent registered charity since 2011

We provide a British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy accredited counselling service and adhere to their ethical framework*. Our clinical staff have developed their skills in a number of different settings, both NHS and voluntary. We are not a specialist service, but have experience in helping people with a wide range of problems. We offer different forms of counselling to match your needs, which are assessed at your first appointment with us.

Our service is for adults over the age of 18. Our counsellors offer appointments throughout the week including outside of normal working hours. Enquiries can be made between 10.00 and 13:00 Monday to Friday.

We have a purpose designed counselling suite in Hereford and use rooms in the market towns. Due to the restrictions associated with the coronavirus we are now offering online assessments and sessions.

You can read our “Charitable Objects” here

*BACP Ethical Framework (full text)

Our objectives

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Local, Affordable Service

The provision of a locally based, confidential, reliable and affordable counselling and psychotherapy service, with a fast and smooth transition from referral to assessment and an allocated counsellor.

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Sign Posting

To provide and facilitate a sign-posting service to local agencies, statutory, voluntary or private, for those who contact the service but for whom counselling would not be appropriate.

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Professional

The provision of a supportive and educative working environment for counsellors to raise and maintain professional standards and thereby benefit the recipients of therapy.

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Working Against Stigma

Working against the stigma of mental illness and distress by education and awareness raising within the general public. Provision of a service with equal access for vulnerable adults, regardless of social, sexual and religious diversity.

We provide

Individual – person to person

This includes approaches where you focus with your counsellor on coping techniques, as well as those which look more in depth at present or past patterns in your life and relationships. The aim is to help you understand and deal with where you are now, so the future can be different.

Relationship counselling

This allows two people to work together with a counsellor on how you are understanding each other. It can help you change patterns in how you relate and find more satisfaction in being together. This is not always about keeping the old relationship, but about finding a positive way to live differently.

Group therapy

This is when a group of people who share some common difficulties come together with a counsellor to consider where they are in their lives and think together about ways forward: sometimes using specific techniques like mindfulness, sometimes in a more open way.

We believe

“Just as cosmetic surgery promotes the impossible ideal of eternal youth, so mental health promotion increasingly suggests there is a perfect state of mental health to which we all need to aspire, and which we need to work on ourselves to achieve.”
Moncrieff,J (2014) Ideas about mental health in a neoliberal world. In Group-Analytic Contexts 66, eds. T. Birchmore & P. Zelaskowski, p15

At Marches Counselling we offer a service which helps people explore and work with the dissatisfaction they feel, whether that be with themselves, their situation, or the society they move within. We hope that we can find ways of helping someone feel more comfortable ‘in their own skins’ and more able to engage with the environment in which they find themselves. This can be challenging when we need to question assumptions we make about ourselves and others.
At MCS we believe that no one way forward is the ‘right’ way. We believe that each person is unique and this is why we offer different approaches with counsellors trained in different traditions. For each person it must be their own path which is trodden, whoever walks alongside. We can only be present on that journey for a while, helping recognise the difficulties, offering tools which may be useful, perhaps pointing out some of the dangers – but also the hidden treasures which these journeys can offer.

Find out more

If you would like to find out more about our service or to request an assessment appointment, please get in touch.

Get In Touch