Co-parenting and fatherhood · One-to-one · Anywhere in the UK
I'm Brian Sheppard, a clinical psychotherapist and mental health specialist, UKCP registered, with over 25 years in mental health. Co-parenting after a separation means keeping a working relationship with someone you may not want to speak to, for the sake of children you'd do anything for. Fatherhood after separation is a particular interest of mine: being a dad in the gaps between handovers, with less time, less say and often less sympathy than you expected, is its own kind of hard, and it's welcome here. I work with one parent at a time, so the hour is about how you get through it, not about who wins.
Does this sound familiar?
Separated parents, mothers and fathers, doing the handovers, the messages and the school plays with someone they no longer share a life with. You might recognise some of this:
You can't make the other parent reasonable. You can decide who you're going to be in this, and that's more than it sounds.
Let's talk it throughMy approach
Co-parenting counselling with me is one-to-one. Your ex doesn't come, doesn't hear what you've said unless you choose to tell them, and isn't the client; you are. That's deliberate. I'm not a mediator and I'm not the family court. I won't referee the contact arrangements, and I don't write reports. What I can do is help you get steady enough that the arrangements stop running your nervous system.
In practice that means we look at what actually happens. The message that made you see red. The handover you dreaded all week. The moment your daughter repeated something that plainly came from the other house. We slow it down, look at what it touched in you, why the reaction was as big as it was, and what you'd rather do next time. Not scripts. More like getting your own voice back in a situation that keeps trying to take it off you.
I'm a person-centred psychotherapist, so there's no curriculum. Some weeks it's practical: how to answer without escalating, how to hold a line without a fight, how to say no to a last-minute change without the guilt eating the rest of the day. Some weeks it's grief for the family you thought you'd have. Some weeks it's plain rage, and this is the one place it's allowed. I've spent over 25 years in mental health, and I don't need it to be tidy.
I work with mothers and fathers, with a particular interest in fathers, who often get less of the children and even less of the sympathy. Sessions are 50 minutes over Zoom, from wherever you can talk freely; for many parents that's the twenty minutes after the school run.
Questions I'm often asked
No, and they can't be. I only work with one parent, and I won't see the other one separately either, because you need to know this room is yours. If you and your ex both want to sit down with a third person to sort out arrangements, that's mediation, and I'll gladly point you to it. This is about you having somewhere to think, feel and plan that nobody else has a say in.
Carefully, and in writing where you can. Most of the parents I work with have had to retire the hope of talking things through like reasonable adults and replace it with something more modest: short, factual messages about the children, answered when you're calm rather than when you're hit, and nothing in them that couldn't be read out in a room. That's not defeat. It's what many separated parents call parallel parenting: two households, one set of children, and as little friction at the join as you can manage. In our sessions the work is usually the gap between reading the message and sending the reply, because that gap is where you win or lose your week.
I don't work with children, so I can't offer that directly, and I'd be careful of anyone who promised it. What I can say is that children read the temperature in the house long before anyone tells them anything, and the parent they live with is most of the weather. The part that's yours, the way you are with them after a bad handover, the things you don't say about their other parent, the steadiness you can manage on a Sunday night, is the part this work is for. If you're worried about a child specifically, your GP or the school is the right first call, and I'll say so.
Yes, and fathers are a large part of why this page exists. A dad who sees his children every other weekend is expected to be grateful, to be fine, and never to say how it feels to be a visitor in his own children's lives. I'm a man and a father, and I know how quickly that turns into anger, or into pulling away because it hurts less. If you're a mother, everything on this page is for you too; read on to counselling for single mothers if you're the one holding the house.
Then tell me on the introductory call, because it changes how I work with you, not whether. I'm not a legal service and I won't write anything for court, but counselling is still yours to have alongside proceedings. If you're not safe, that comes before any of this. The numbers at the bottom of this page are for an emergency, and the National Domestic Abuse Helpline costs nothing to call, is confidential and is open all hours on 0808 2000 247.
Fees and first step
Sessions are 50 minutes over Zoom and cost £80. I keep a small number of reduced-fee places for people on a low income; ask me on the introductory call. How everything works, including cancellations, is on my fees and concessions page.
Before anything else, we have a free introductory call. You tell me a bit about what's going on, I tell you how I work, and we both get a feel for whether it's a fit. No pressure, no obligation. If it isn't right, I'll say so and point you somewhere better.
£80 per session
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