Introducing Walk and Talk Therapy

Funding from the Coronavirus Community Support Fund, distributed by The National Lottery Community Fund, has helped us to start a new project in response to the current Covid pandemic.

Since 2013, The Deborah Ubee Trust has provided counselling and associated therapeutic services from our purpose-built counselling centre which has nine great therapeutic spaces.  Unfortunately, since the beginning of the pandemic, we have not been able to work face-to- and we are not sure when we will be able to welcome clients back to the centre.

At the start of the first lockdown, we began providing online weekly sessions to our clients and this is going well. However not all clients can (or indeed want to) access sessions online; perhaps they don’t have access to the necessary technology or to a private confidential space in which they feel safe to talk.  And this is why we are so excited to be able to offer Walk and Talk therapy, for clients that prefer this option. 

We have developed this new and experiential project because we consider it will offer our clients many different benefits.  Working outdoors isn’t new and there is growing evidence that ecotherapy and outdoor activity are good for mental health, especially in a world where we have become less physically active and less connected to nature. Being more physically active can often help someone to feel less ‘stuck’ when confronting difficult issues, and interacting with the natural world may spur them into increasingly creative ways of thinking around an issue or problem.  And in addition, working outdoors supports social distancing, which is so important given that current thinking suggests that transmission risks are far lower in the fresh air.

The Deborah Ubee Trust has started training the therapeutic team for this new initiative, setting out some basic parameters for the work and offering guidance for those counsellors who want to take their practice outside.  The one-to-one Walk and Talk therapy sessions with these fully trained practitioners will pilot for an initial period of a year after which time we hope to roll it out so that Walk and Talk therapy becomes a permanent addition to the services we provide, further supporting us to fulfil our commitment to enable as many people as possible – and especially the most vulnerable - to fulfil their potential in life.

We believe that nature-based therapy can be a positive choice in which the therapist and the environment can be brought together to offer a holding space to the client.

We hope to start offering this new service to clients from December 2020. The service will be available to adults and children and young people. For adult enquires please email denise@tdut.org. For under 18 please email rosie@tdut.org

Thanks to the Government for making this possible.

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