Richard Cox, BACP

About me

“Direct, grounded, and quietly challenging. I didn’t realise how much I was avoiding myself until I started therapy.”

Hello, I’m Rick.

You may already understand a great deal about yourself.

You may know where your difficulties began, recognise your patterns, and be able to explain why you react as you do. Yet when pressure rises, when a relationship becomes important, or when difficult feelings are stirred, the same pattern takes over again.

Understanding the pattern is important. But understanding it is not the same as changing it.

The question we will examine together is not only:

Why are you like this?

It is also:

What happens inside you, here and now, when feelings arise, and what do you do to move away from them?

My work focuses on three connected processes:
- The feelings that are being activated
- The anxiety that arises in response to those feelings
- The ways you automatically avoid, suppress, control, or disconnect from them

These ways of coping are not signs that something is wrong with you. They developed for a reason. At some point, they helped you manage feelings or relationships that were difficult, frightening, or unsafe.

But a strategy that once protected you may now be restricting your life.

You may overthink instead of feeling.

You may explain instead of experiencing.

You may focus on other people instead of noticing what happens inside you.

You may become pleasing, passive, detached, self-critical, excessively reasonable, or determined to remain in control.

You may understand all of this perfectly, and continue doing it.

That is the difficulty we will work on.

How I work:
This is an active and focused form of therapy.

We will identify the problem you want help with and examine how that problem operates in your present life. We will also pay attention to how the same process may appear during the therapy itself.

I may ask...
- What feeling is being stirred in you right now?
- Where do you notice the anxiety in your body?
- What happens when you begin to approach that feeling?
- Do you notice moving away from the experience by explaining, analysing, withdrawing, pleasing, or attacking yourself?
- What does that response cost you?
- Do you want us to work together against the pattern that is keeping you stuck?

I will not simply follow every detail of a story when the detail is taking us away from the problem you came to address.

When I notice that happening, I will tell you.

Not to criticise you, catch you out, or take control away from you, but because the same movement away from yourself may be part of what is causing your difficulties outside therapy.

You remain in charge of whether you want to examine it.

My responsibility is to help us see it clearly.

Working with emotion and anxiety:
The aim is not to make you feel as much as possible, as quickly as possible. The aim is to help you experience feelings without becoming overwhelmed by anxiety or having to escape through the usual protective pattern.

We will pay close attention to your capacity.

When anxiety is manageable, we can continue exploring what lies underneath it.

When anxiety becomes too high, affects your thinking, or causes you to disconnect from the experience, we slow down and regulate before proceeding.

Therapy should challenge what restricts you without overwhelming the system that has protected you.

Real change occurs when you can recognise the pattern as it happens, understand its function, experience what it has been keeping out of awareness, and develop a different response.

I often work with people who:
- Experience anxiety, overthinking, or persistent emotional tension
- Feel emotionally flat, shut down, or disconnected
- Repeat painful patterns in relationships
- Appear capable and high-functioning while struggling internally
- Find themselves constantly pleasing, performing, or managing other people
- Become trapped in self-criticism, shame, avoidance, or excessive control
- Have had therapy before and gained insight without experiencing substantial change

Many of my clients are highly articulate and psychologically minded. Their intelligence is not the problem.

Sometimes, however, intelligence becomes a very effective way of remaining at a distance from emotional experience. When that happens, we will respect your ability to think while also noticing whether thinking is helping you approach the problem or avoid it.

My therapeutic stance:
I am calm, direct, and actively engaged.

I will not force you to go somewhere you are not able or willing to go but I will also not pretend that repeatedly describing the problem is the same as working on it.

When we encounter something that obstructs the work, I will try to name it clearly. We can then examine why it is happening, what it protects you from, and whether you want to continue relying on it.

This work requires collaboration.

I cannot change the pattern for you. You should not have to fight it alone.

Clients often describe me as:
“Grounded, thoughtful, and more active than I expected, in a good way.”

In our first session, we will begin by clarifying:
- What problem you want help with
- How that problem affects your life and relationships
- What tends to trigger it
- What feelings and anxiety become activated
- How you currently respond when this happens
- Whether your usual response helps you or keeps the problem going
- Whether this way of working is appropriate for you

I will also pay attention to how anxiety shows up in your body and whether we can work productively without moving too quickly or remaining too distant from the problem.

By the end of the session, we should have a clearer understanding of what you want to change, what may be preventing that change, and whether we can establish a useful therapeutic task together.

Experience and training:
As of 2026, I’m a UK-based, BACP-credentialed, and IEDTA student therapist with over eight years’ experience and more than 5,000 hours of clinical work.

I am also in a three-year Core Training in Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy, or ISTDP.

This intensive clinical training is developing greater precision in how I assess and work with feelings, anxiety, psychological defences, and the moment-to-moment therapeutic relationship.

It does not mean applying the same level of pressure to every person. It means responding more accurately to what each person can tolerate, what is obstructing progress, and what is required for therapy to become effective.

I have worked extensively with:
- Anxiety and chronic stress
- Trauma and early emotional wounding
- Relationship and attachment difficulties
- Emotional fragility and difficulties regulating anxiety
- Emotional shutdown, passivity, and over-control
- Long-standing patterns that have not changed through insight alone

I also know something of this territory personally.

I am not interested in diagnosing your character or treating you as something that needs to be fixed. I am interested in understanding, with you, the system that developed to protect you.

We can then examine whether that system is still protecting you, or whether it has become the prison from which you are now trying to escape.

Professional experience

Additional areas of focus: Coping with addictions, Coping with grief and loss, Intimacy related issues, Eating disorders, Sleeping disorders, Parenting issues, Anger management, Motivation, self esteem, and confidence, Career difficulties, Bipolar disorder, Depression, Compassion fatigue, Abandonment, Antisocial personality, Attachment issues, Avoidant personality, BDSM, kink, and alternative sex culture, Blended family issues, Body image, Codependency, Commitment issues, Control issues, Dependent personality, Dissociation, Drug and alcohol addiction, Eating and food-related issues, Emptiness, Family of origin issues, Family problems, Fatherhood issues, Forgiveness, Gender dysphoria, Guilt and shame, Hoarding, Impulsivity, Infidelity, Isolation / loneliness, Jealousy, Life purpose, Men's issues, Midlife crisis, Mood disorders, Panic disorder and panic attacks, Paranoia, Personality disorders, Phobias, Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships, Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling), Self-harm, Self-love, Sex addiction, Sexual assault and abuse, Sexual dysfunction, Sexuality, Social anxiety and phobia, Somatization, Women's issues, Workplace issues, Young adult issues

Clinical approaches: Attachment-Based Therapy, Client-Centered Therapy, Existential Therapy, Jungian Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, Trauma-Focused Therapy

License information

BACP Therapist - Registered Member MBACP (Accred) #394009

Reviews

These quotes represent just a few of the many positive reviews that we have received for Richard Cox. We don't pay anyone to provide their review and they are all made voluntarily. Some people's experience receiving therapy with BetterHelp might be different.