About Michelle
Michelle Robinson-Hayes is a counsellor with a focus on phobias alongside anxiety, stress and related concerns. She draws on a decade of practical experience to help people manage worries, low mood, grief and relationship strain. Her style is warm and straightforward, aiming to make sessions feel calm and useful from the first meeting.
Michelle uses a mix of talking therapies and hypnotherapy to tackle fears and unhelpful thinking. She often works on practical steps clients can try between sessions.
Background and approach
Conversations are collaborative so people leave with clear actions and a sense of progress. Her background includes senior management experience in corporate settings, where she led teams and delivered training. She founded a community counselling and hypnotherapy service called The Listening Tree and has run that practice for over eight years.
That work has involved teaching and supervising trainee counsellors and hypnotherapists. Michelle is registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy - BACP. She has provided more than 1,000 hours of counselling and around 500 hours of hypnotherapy.
Her past volunteering includes substantial bereavement work with national services. In sessions she blends client-centred listening with practical tools from cognitive behavioural approaches and mindfulness. She also uses hypnotherapy and motivational coaching when appropriate.
Many clients choose her for support with phobias, trauma, sleep problems and life transitions. To begin, Michelle asks people to complete a short matching questionnaire and then schedules sessions that suit both parties. The goal is steady, manageable change rather than quick fixes.
How Michelle uses talking therapies and online sessions
Client-Centred Therapy focuses on listening and understanding the person's perspective. It helps people feel heard and build the confidence to make changes. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT, looks at how thoughts, feelings and behaviours connect and teaches practical techniques to reduce worry and avoidant habits. Hypnotherapy uses guided relaxation and focused attention to support changes in habit, confidence and reactions to triggers.Choosing the right approach is a joint decision. Michelle will discuss goals, preferences and what feels manageable, and then adapt methods as work progresses. That means techniques can shift over time if something else seems a better fit for a client's needs.
Online sessions come in several formats - video calls, phone sessions, live chat and text messaging. Video calls are useful for a full conversation and visual cues, phone sessions need less bandwidth and can fit a work break, and live chat or messaging can work for short check-ins or when typing feels easier. These options make therapy more flexible and easier to fit around travel, work or family commitments while keeping the same therapeutic focus.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Grief
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Coaching
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Phobias
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Visually impaired
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 10 years
- Licensed
- Languages
- English
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