I’m DAVE COOPER

Systemic Therapist & Recovery Coach

Helping You Find & Forge Your Own Path

Personal Recovery Coaching

The Alternative to Rehab treatment plan is available to you. An evidence based approach that is proving effective for every different form of addiction and dependence

Couples Counselling

The Marriage Dr Couples counselling course is available to you. A Systemic approach that offers a guaranteed way of reconnecting you as a couple.

Helping You Achieve your aims

Building Your Recovery

My approach is known as ‘systemic’. This means that I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I do not have a medical background and so I will not be offering anything similar to CBT or analysis. Rather I will be offering you an evidence based approach which will not only provide an effective working method, but will also provide valuable knowledge helping you understand how you became addicted in the first place. 

Because this approach is based on intensive ‘one-to-one counselling. You will always be supported and guided in your new recovered lifestyle. We will be working with your relationships, how you are engaging with those around you. How you are understanding and communicating with others.

The recovery treatment can be short or long term, depending on the issues involved. Each of your sessions will be purposeful and meaningful. Good counselling involves listening, so I will not only be offering quick fix answers but will first really hear what you are saying. This approach helps you to explore your experience in a new way. Encouraging you to always be learning more about yourself.

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Preparation

You wouldn’t buy a house without thinking very carefully about it. It’s the same with your recovery

Preparation is so important. On this course we cover the three important considerations, cost design and location

Foundation

Whatever you are going to achieve and aim for in your sobriety, it must be built on good foundations. I will show you how to build this foundation looking at the two most important issues, solidity and stability

Ground Floor

Once we have estalished your foundation we will use the right materials to build our ground floor. This floor is all about learning to do the ‘normal things’ without which we cannot build our first floor….

First Floor

Which is all about your aims and goals. Things that have been beyond your reach in your addicted lifestyle. Moving towards your goals becomes possible because you built on solid, well designed plan.

What Is Systemic Counselling?
Who is it For?

This approach always sees people in relationship and largely assesses a persons quality of life this way.

Whilst acknowledging that the past can strongly affect and shape our lives the systemic approach does not spend much time dredging things up. Rather it helps people to see the way the past remains with us today.

 The Systemic approach is flexible in that individual sessions can become couples sessions or family sessions over time as things develop. We recognise that family and couples work is specialised and as such forms a major part of the training.

Systemic Recovery Coaching

Addiction and Dependence are things that can devestate families and ruin lives. The systemic approach uses evidence based methods which will allow you to understand why you do what you do and how to manage yourself better in those difficult moments that make all the difference.

Systemic Couples Counselling

The Systemic approach will help you to reconnect with your partner in even better ways than you did originally. Working with my wife we offer you an eight session course that has been proved to be effective time and time again.

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Systemic Family Therapy

Families go through all kinds of trnsitions and difficulties. The systemic approach is designed to work best when working with whole families. It is designed to support the family system through your difficulties more than any other approach.

Systemic One to One counselling

Even though the systemic approach is designed to work with systems, one to one counselling still proves to be very effective as the focus of the work is the quality of the relationships. Depression, Anxiety, loss and transitioning are all supported in this model

About Me

As a therapist I offer several different forms of counselling. Starting with one to one general counselling needs.  As a couple we also offer couples counselling.

My specialist area is addiction recovery. I run a service called A2R (Alternative to Rehab). This is a one to one recovery coaching service that enables you to remain at home and at work whilst engaging with an intense and effective recovery programme.

I am a recovered  addict who believes that personal recovery coaching is the best treatment for addiction in most cases.

Testimonials

“My advice for anyone taking up this service would be to persevere if at first you don’t think this is for you.  By the end of our 6 sessions I felt like everything had clicked into place.  I really felt like Dave had understood where I was coming from and had very quickly (considering the fairly limited amount of time) managed to get the measure of me and my situation.  Everyone is different but I don’t tend to confide in people so this in itself was a big deal for me.”

Claire – Client

“Session one he had given me a couple of questions to think about and straight after the session I’d written my answers down, then just before session two I looked at them again and answered them differently. I wasn’t sure how, in such a short time I could have changed the answers but as the sessions went on it became apparent – what Dave was doing by challenging me was making me reflect and this was something I don’t usually do”.

Phil – Client

“Dave has taken me through a process that helps me understand myself much better.  I have become more aware of my thoughts (both conscious and unconscious), feelings and emotional states and in turn started to questions a lot of my automatic behaviours and beliefs I have held about myself and others.  Through working through these I no longer fee the need to exit my life temporarily for some relief and respite by drinking and drugging”.

Rob – Client

Unblend to overcome!

You are complex If you have been following my work for any length of time, you will already know that this approach turns a lot of medical thinking on its head. The idea of unblending is no exception to that idea! So many of the clients I work with have been trying...

The non-medical approach to recovery

If you have been thinking about attempting to recover from your addictive behaviour, it’s possible that you have not even considered what approach you will be taking. The medical model of addiction has become so prevalent in our (western) culture that you may be...

Understanding and working with your parts

Not considering your parts may be restricting your progress After nearly forty years working in the field, I am in no doubt about the biggest difficulties you face when trying to make positive lifestyle changes in your life. It is not considering the complex nature of...

Art reflecting Life

Addiction and reverse addiction in filmIt always amazes me when I see art reflecting the deeper things in life, particularly in film. Patterns and themes that can often take therapists years to learn and recognise are often portrayed by artists with no training or...

Would you rather be excited or contented? 

The pressure to be excitedWe live in a world where we are encouraged from all sides to be excited about everything. This is a part of a cultural shift towards hyping everything. This has become extreme now so that when passing someone the salt we are no longer...

Consciousness and the observer position

Have you ever stopped to consider the idea of consciousness? And what part it plays in your recovery journey? If you have, you will have been using your consciousness to do it! But what is it? What makes us aware that we are aware? Neuroscience is around a hundred...

Things that stand in the way of your recovery

Part One

Things that stand in the way of your recovery

Part Two

Things that stand in the way of your recovery

Part Three

Find Your Recovery. Set Your Goals. The reward is in the Challenge.

This approach always sees people in their relationships and understands that we largely assess our quality of life this way. I often say to my clients “when your relationship with everybody and everything is healthy then you will be healthy”.