Click Here For one-to-one counselling or psychotherapy
Click Here For low-cost options
Click Here For couples, families & children
Click Here For group therapy
Click Here For assistance in finding the right person / option for you
Click Here To choose your own practitioner
Click Here For information on different therapy options
Assistance in finding the right person or option
Assessment and Referral Appointments
The purpose of this session is to help you find the right therapist and approach to therapy for you.
Finding the right therapist in Oxfordshire to fit with you and what you are wanting to achieve in counselling/therapy is the most important factor that determines how beneficial the process might be.
Your Appointment
An initial assessment & referral appointment takes about one hour.
Let us know if you would like to arrange an appointment, and details of your availability.
The fee for this appointment is from a minimum of £45 - £80 (£60 - £80 for couples). The fee you pay will be the maximum of whatever (per session) limit you give us to help you find your therapist. This is to allow people that need to to access the low-cost OTS service. You can find information on the cost of sessions in the next section.
Click Here To apply for an assessment appointment
How quickly will I be seen?
At present we can usually see you for an assessment within a week. There may need to be a wait before a suitable practitioner is available however. We try to keep this wait as short as possible, but it all depends on several factors:
Fees for Sessions
Low-Cost Service Fees
Fees for this service are in the range of £20-£45 per session. This service is staffed by trainees in supervision with us, newly qualified practitioners building their practices and occasionally by experienced practitioners with a lower fee place available.
Individual Counselling & Psychotherapy Fees
This is dependant on the practitioner. In Oxfordshire the average cost of therapy with an experienced practitioner is around £55 per session, and the range is generally from £45 - £90 per session.
Couples Therapy Fees
Couples Therapy is generally charged at a higher rate than individual sessions, from £60 - £90 per hour session.
Group Therapy
Group therapy is currently charged on a sliding scale from £20 - £45 per session. A session last for up to 2 1/2 hours.
Low-Cost Options
There are two main low-cost options:
Group Therapy
For many people this is as effective as individual therapy. Once you have gotten over the initial anxiety (common for most people) you will realise how effective and supportive it can be. You can read more about group therapy here on the main OTS website.
Low-cost Service
This service is mainly staffed by trainees on placement with us. The fees for this service help them to cover the cost of room rental and supervision. Toward the higher end of this scale, there can be places available with newly qualified practitioners who are still building the practice, as well as experienced professionals who offer some low cost work. Demand for this service can be high, and there may be a wait depending on factors explained here .
Couples Therapy / Counselling
If couples therapy, is to be of use to you, it often requires some time, commitment and cost, so it is important to find the right person. Exploring if couples therapy is the right course for you to take, and who you might work well with are the main purposes of an initial assessment.
In finding you the right person, there are many things to consider. Practicalities such as your availability and personal affordability need to be established, as well as whether you are prepared to travel for the right therapist, who may or may not be at the OTS-Witney Therapy Centre.
All people (and couples) are different, and the relationship you have with your counsellor is seen by most as the most important element in achieving a successful outcome. Different practitioners work in different ways, and have different personalities. These differences can be important in working with you as individuals. So whilst an expert car mechanic might be able to work with many different cars, it is not the same with counselling.
Additionally, some couples can often benefit from working on their own for a while before starting couples therapy, and an assessment can explore this also.
The assessment appointment will take about one hour, and is charged at £55 payable by cash or cheque. Couples therapy is generally charged at between £60 and £90 per one-hour session depending on the practitioner, and is generally either weekly or fortnightly. If it is fortnightly it often arrange for a 90 minute session to allow more space. Individual therapy is available from £20.
Click here to enquire
Family Therapy
Currently, most family therapists in Oxfordshire work within the NHS, so you maybe able to get a referral through your GP. We may be able to offer family therapy if all members are over 18. Please feel free to enquire.
Click here to enquire
Please choose from the following options...
Click Here For Room Hire
Click Here To join OTS-Witney or OTS-Oxford
Click Here For Supervision & Training
Click Here For Practitioner Events
Reasons why people contact us
People want to find a counsellor or a psychotherapist for many different reasons. Some want help with specific emotional problems such as depression, loneliness or anxiety, or they may wish to generally feel more alive. Some may have difficulty coming to terms with a traumatic or painful personal history. Others may feel stuck in recurring patterns that prevent them from feeling fulfilled, from connecting with others, or from finding meaning in their lives.
Sometimes people wish to find a counsellor or a therapist for help during a crisis, such as the end of a relationship, bereavement, divorce, redundancy resulting in loss of direction in life or other traumatic event such as rape, abortion or miscarriage.
Many of our clients tell us they contacted the OTS-Witney Therapy Centre in order to:
About the OTS-Witney Therapy Centre
The OTS-Witney Therapy Centre opened in 2004 to provide beautiful low-cost therapy room hire in Witney for psychotherapists, counsellors and complementary therapists, and to provide a range of counselling and psychotherapy services to the general public. We ensure all practitioners are fully qualified and insured.
Our Therapy Centre is in central Witney, just around the corner from the main bus stops at the top of the High Street. So we are well placed for people travelling from Abingdon, Burford, Bampton, Carterton, Eynsham, Faringdon, Oxford, Wantage and other surrounding towns and villages.
If you want assistance with the huge range of therapy options - approaches and types that are available, please feel free to call Justin Smith on 07977 126330, or email him here.
The PsychoEducational Blog
Welcome to our blog - To help develop our understanding of human nature and the challenge of changing how life is. We will add new thinking to this blog at the beginning of each month so you can check back for the next instalment!
There is a journey unfolding with our blog posts, so, you can start from the beginning here. We post the most recent month's blog below...
July 2025:The Law Of Unconscious Attraction (part 1)
One of the first books that I read on human nature was called ‘Women Who Love Too Much’, by Robin Norwood. In it she talked about her research interviewing women who had gone into refuges to escape abusive relationships with alcoholic men. She found many women who had been married several times or, been in relationships several times with alcoholic abusive men. She also interviewed women who said they didn’t understand it, as ‘John’ didn’t drink when she met him, and he was lovely to her. How then did this keep happening?
This section is definitely not to excuse or blame behaviours that are clearly not ok, but it is about wondering how relationships can come about and develop, seemingly according to some kind of patterning. Norwood also found that the women she had interviewed had predominantly had alcoholic and abusive fathers. Which is what we might think about, in terms of where the ‘patterning’ begins.
Being around one’s parents, is like staring at the sun for a long time; it burns an image into your retina. Look at it long enough, and the image never goes away - which is why we are told from when we are small, don’t look at the sun! Being around parents as our dominant influence has the same, though much more complex effect on our neural network and our nervous systems. Have you noticed how many parents are walking along with their children, and paying more attention to their phone than the child? We might wonder what messages the child is picking up in terms of their importance and value in comparison with the phone!
There are many different models of thinking about how we develop in childhood, how patterns of relating, both to ourselves and others, get set up. But again, referring to early threads in this blog, if we take the neuroscience seriously, the degree of unconsciousness which we all have means that it is often difficult to see the patterns, and how they are manifesting all of the time, not least in our choice of romantic partner.
We can think of relationships as developing out of attachment styles, or within the TA model of ‘Parent, Adult, Child’ relationships (as two of many), but whichever model we use, I don’t think we can get around there being unconscious processes at work in our choices.
If you ask people why they fell in love with their husband or wife, my experience is that you get responses from a fairly limited and superficial range of conscious reasons. I don’t mean superficial in any derogatory way, but to refer to the fact that they are reasons which our limited conscious minds can make sense of.
But again, if we take seriously the idea that our patterns of relating to ourselves and others get set up in childhood, then we might come up with more complex answers than the common ones of:
Next month I will continue with Part 2 of ‘The Law Of Unconscious Attraction’
