Counselling for Anxiety, Low Mood and Feeling Stuck in Leeds

There may not be one big thing you could point to. Nothing has gone dramatically wrong. And yet somewhere along the way, life started feeling heavier than it looks from the outside, and you have been quietly carrying that on your own.

This page is about that.

I am Roman Romeo, an integrative counsellor online. I work with adults who feel anxious, low, stuck or lost, and who are often managing perfectly well on the surface while something underneath tells them things are not quite right.

When nothing is wrong, but nothing feels right

A great deal of distress does not look like crisis. It looks like getting up, going to work, replying to messages, being reliable, and feeling further and further from yourself while you do it. Because everything functions, it can be hard to justify asking for help, and easy to conclude that this is simply what adult life is.

What I have come to understand, both through my own therapy and through the people I work with, is that this quiet version of struggling is no less real for being invisible. It usually has a logic to it, and finding that logic is where change begins

What people bring to therapy

Everyone arrives with something slightly different, but certain themes come up again and again.

Anxiety that hums in the background. Not always panic, though sometimes it is. More often a constant low-level bracing, overthinking conversations after they have ended, rehearsing ones that have not happened yet, never quite being able to settle.

A flatness you cannot name. Things that used to matter do not seem to reach you the way they did. You are not in despair, exactly. You are muted, and you cannot remember when that started.

Feeling stuck. Knowing something needs to change, and not knowing what, or knowing exactly what and not being able to make yourself do it. The same job, the same argument, the same Sunday night dread, on a loop.

Being the capable one. Everyone comes to you. You hold things together at work, at home, among your friends, and somewhere in all that holding you stopped being asked how you are. You are quietly running on empty.

Relationships that repeat. Different people, same dynamic. You end up over-giving, or shutting down, or choosing people who cannot quite meet you, and you can see the pattern without being able to step out of it.

The sense of being behind. Everyone else seems to have worked something out that you missed. On paper you are doing fine. It does not feel like it.

None of this means there is something wrong with you. It means you learned ways of coping, usually early and usually for good reasons, that are now costing you more than they protect you.

Why we look at patterns, not just symptoms

Anxiety and low mood are often the surface of something with deeper roots: the patterns in how you relate to yourself and to other people, learned long before you had any say in them. The voice that tells you everyone else is managing better. The part of you that says yes when you mean no. The habit of being fine until you are suddenly not.

Rather than only managing how you feel week to week, we look at where those patterns came from and how they still run. Transactional Analysis, one of the main approaches I use, gives us a clear and practical language for this. It tends to make the invisible obvious, and the obvious workable. Once a pattern is understood, you have a choice you did not have before.

What therapy with me is like

My approach is integrative, which means I draw on more than one way of working and shape the therapy around you rather than fitting you to a single method.

A great deal of it is simply space. Most people have nowhere in their life where they can say what they actually think and feel without managing someone else's reaction. There is nothing you need to achieve here and nobody keeping score. You set the pace, and nothing you bring is too small. If it is weighing on you, it is serious enough.

I was a teacher before I was a counsellor, and it shows. I care about you understanding yourself, not just feeling temporarily better, and I would rather you leave a session with something that makes sense of you than with a technique you will forget by Thursday.

I am also attachment-informed, which matters because the ways we learned to connect, to please, to withdraw or to protect ourselves in our earliest relationships tend to repeat in our adult ones, often in ways that catch us off guard.

If you are neurodivergent

Some of the people I work with are autistic or have ADHD, diagnosed recently or long ago or still deciding whether to find out. I adapt how I work rather than expecting you to fit the usual shape of therapy. That might mean agreeing between us that I will bring us back on track when a session wanders, or working with less eye contact, or taking things at a slower pace. We work out together what actually helps.

Practical details

Sessions are 50 minutes and usually take place weekly, at around the same time each week. Online sessions are held over Google Meet, and in person sessions are available in Leeds.

The fee is £60 per session. I hold four concessionary spaces at £45 for students and people on a low income. Please just ask whether one is currently available. There is no form and no need to explain your circumstances in detail.

If you need to cancel, please give 48 hours' notice where you can. I do understand that life does not always give notice, so if something unavoidable happens, tell me and we will work it out between us.

Taking the first step

You do not need a diagnosis, a crisis, or a neat explanation of what is wrong. "I don't feel right and I don't know why" is more than enough to start with. You are welcome to book a free 15 minute consultation, which is simply a relaxed conversation to see how it feels to talk with me, with no obligation to carry on.

Feeling that something is not quite right is reason enough. You do not need to wait until it gets worse.

Roman Romeo,
MA Integrative Counselling,
Registered Member MBACP