Karen Spilsbury
Compassionate, practical support for lasting change
About Karen
Karen Spilsbury is a counsellor based in the United Kingdom with eight years of professional experience. She supports people dealing with stress, anxiety, addictions, trauma and abuse, and self-esteem concerns. She also helps people manage big life changes and challenges to motivation and confidence.
She works from the belief that each person knows their own story best. She looks for strengths clients already have and builds on them. The first step to start therapy can feel hard, and she acknowledges the courage it takes to begin.
Background and approach
In sessions she uses practical methods drawn from approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, client-centred work and hypnotherapy. These tools are used to help people develop clearer thinking, better coping habits, and steadier emotional responses. Her style is down-to-earth and collaborative.
She aims to make therapy a place to test ideas, practise new skills, and make small changes that add up. Conversation, exercises and reflective tasks may all be part of the process. She has worked with a wide range of concerns including attachment and abandonment issues, codependency, communication difficulties, dissociation, domestic violence, and substance misuse.
Sessions are delivered in English and are offered online in a variety of formats to match different needs and routines.
What Karen works with
How Karen works
Listed by Karen among the ways they work.
Listed by Karen among the ways they work.
Listed by Karen among the ways they work.
Listed by Karen among the ways they work.
Listed by Karen among the ways they work.
Listed by Karen among the ways they work.
Sessions & fees
Therapeutic approaches and online working
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses on noticing thoughts and feelings and choosing actions that match personal values. It can help with anxiety, stress and motivation by shifting attention away from unhelpful struggle and towards meaningful steps. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) looks at how thoughts, feelings and behaviours interact and uses practical exercises to change unhelpful patterns; it is often used for anxiety, low mood and coping skills. Client-centred therapy puts the person’s experience at the heart of the work, using empathic listening and collaboration to build insight and self-directed change.Choosing the right approach is part of the work together. The therapist will talk with people about their goals, preferences and daily life to decide which methods to try first. That collaborative process makes it easier to adjust methods as needs change over time.
Online sessions use video calls, phone sessions, live chat or text-based messaging to give flexibility. Video calls are useful for deeper conversation and visual rapport. Phone sessions can be a good fit when bandwidth is limited or a simpler check-in is needed. Live chat and messaging suit shorter check-ins, ongoing support between sessions, or people who prefer typing to speaking. These options help therapy fit around work, family life and other commitments.
| Session length | Typically 50 minutes |
|---|---|
| Client ages | Adults, 18 and over |
| Fees | Subscription via BetterHelp, cancel anytime |
| Insurance | Not billed directly |
Questions people ask
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Areas of focus
What this therapist works with
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trichotillomania
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 8 years
- Registered with
- NCPS
- Languages
- English
