Jo McDermott is a BACP member and Person-Centred Counselling Therapist offering individual counselling in Henley-on-Thames and online. She works with adults experiencing bereavement, separation and divorce, relationship difficulties, anxiety, stress and burnout, as well as women navigating menopause, empty nest, retirement and other significant changes in midlife and later life.
Many of the people who come to Jo are used to being the person who copes. They may be juggling work, relationships, children, ageing parents or other caring responsibilities, often while dealing with their own grief, anxiety or difficult experiences from the past.
From the outside, they may appear to be managing. Inside, things can feel very different. They may feel overwhelmed, lonely, angry or exhausted, struggle to assert themselves in relationships or have reached a point where simply carrying on regardless isn’t working anymore.
Counselling with Jo offers somewhere to put some of that weight down and begin thinking about yourself again.
You might be the reliable one. The person who sorts things out, keeps going and doesn’t make a fuss. Perhaps you’ve always believed you should be able to cope without asking for help.
Sometimes there is one event that tips the balance, such as a bereavement, separation, children leaving home or difficulties within a relationship. At other times, there isn’t an obvious crisis. You simply realise that you’re exhausted, unhappy or increasingly disconnected from the person you used to be.
If being the reliable one has left you feeling invisible, counselling can provide somewhere to explore what has been happening to you while you’ve been busy looking after everything and everyone else.
Jo won’t tell you what you should do. She works with you to understand what matters to you, what you may have lost sight of and what might need to change for life to feel more manageable and fulfilling.
Grief can change far more than how you feel about the person you have lost. It can affect your confidence, relationships, routines, sense of identity and how you imagined your future would look.
Jo has a particular interest in bereavement counselling and supports people experiencing grief and loss, including miscarriage.
There isn’t a correct way to grieve or a point at which you should have “moved on”. You may feel intense sadness, anger, guilt or loneliness, or find yourself feeling numb and wondering why you aren’t reacting in the way you expected.
Sometimes the people around you are grieving too, or they may expect you to be coping better by now. Counselling gives you somewhere you don’t have to protect anybody else from how you really feel.
The end of a relationship can bring grief of its own. Even when separation is the right decision, you may be mourning the relationship, the family you thought you would have or the future you had imagined.
Jo works with people going through separation and divorce as well as those struggling within an existing relationship. You may be questioning whether to stay or leave your relationship, trying to adjust to being on your own or beginning to recognise repeating patterns in your relationships that have left you feeling unheard or unsure of yourself.
If you have spent years adapting to other people, it can be surprisingly difficult to answer a simple question: What do I actually want?
Individual counselling with Jo gives you space to explore your relationship, your needs and your boundaries without pushing you towards a particular decision. Understanding what is happening, how you feel and what you need can be an important first step before deciding what comes next.
Midlife can bring several changes at once. Children may become more independent or leave home, parents may need increasing support, relationships can shift and work may no longer provide the same sense of purpose. Menopause and post-menopause can add another layer of physical and emotional change.
Jo has a particular interest in supporting women through these stages of life.
For some women, empty nest syndrome brings an unexpected sense of loss. After years structured around parenting, the question “What do I want now?” can be surprisingly difficult to answer.
For others, it may be retirement, menopause, a relationship change or simply reaching a stage where they begin questioning whether the life they have built still fits them. These transitions don’t necessarily mean that something has gone wrong, but they can unsettle your sense of identity and bring feelings that are difficult to explain, particularly when life looks fine but doesn’t feel right.
Counselling can help you reconnect with yourself and explore who you are now, rather than assuming you need to return to the person you were before.
People who are good at coping can sometimes miss the signs that they aren’t coping anymore.
You might throw yourself into work, parenting, caring for others or simply staying busy. You keep going because there doesn’t seem to be another option, but underneath you may feel increasingly anxious, irritable, exhausted or hopeless.
Jo supports people experiencing anxiety, significant stress and work-related burnout. For women in particular, burnout can become intertwined with caring responsibilities, relationships, work and the expectation that they should somehow manage all of them well.
If you’ve reached the point where a holiday or a few days off no longer seems to fix the exhaustion, therapy can help you look at what is creating the pressure rather than simply finding new ways to keep pushing through it.
For some women, this experience is part of a wider pattern of burnout in women, where emotional labour, caring responsibilities and the pressure to keep functioning can gradually take their toll.
Underneath stress, difficult relationships and constantly putting other people first, Jo often encounters something else: a sense of not being good enough.
You may doubt yourself, find it difficult to say no or worry about disappointing other people. Perhaps your own needs feel less important, or you’ve become so used to defining yourself through your relationships and responsibilities that your sense of worth depends heavily on what you do for others.
Jo passionately believes that people have inherent worth and the capacity to grow. Her work isn’t about turning you into a different person, but helping you understand yourself with greater compassion and begin recognising your own needs, values and strengths. Developing a stronger sense of self-worth and feeling good enough can make it easier to make choices because they are right for you rather than because they keep everybody else happy.
Sometimes what you’re struggling with now isn’t only about what is happening today. Previous difficult or traumatic experiences can influence how you see yourself, how safe you feel in relationships and how you respond when life becomes stressful.
Jo has undertaken additional professional development in working with trauma and understands the importance of approaching earlier experiences carefully and at the client’s pace. Trauma counselling isn’t about forcing you to revisit everything that has happened. It can be about understanding how the past may still be affecting you now and finding ways to feel less controlled by it.
Jo is warm, friendly and down to earth. She doesn’t want counselling to feel overly formal or clinical, and clients often appreciate that she is relatable and genuinely in their corner.
She works at your pace and understands that you may not arrive knowing exactly what you want to talk about. You don’t need a neatly organised explanation of what is wrong. You can begin with whatever has brought you through the door.
Jo describes herself as a good listener, but her work isn’t limited to simply listening. She wants to understand what is really happening for you and help you get to the heart of things. As therapy develops, she can help you see yourself and your circumstances from a different perspective and begin considering what moving forward might look like.
Her hope is that counselling leaves you not only feeling properly heard, but with greater confidence in yourself and a genuine sense that the future can be different.
Jo is a Person-Centred therapist, which means she starts from the belief that you are the person who knows your own life best.
Rather than positioning herself as the expert who will tell you what decisions to make, Jo offers a supportive relationship in which you can explore your thoughts and feelings honestly, including those you may find difficult to admit to other people.
She believes everyone has worth and value, even when they have lost sight of it themselves. Through warmth, compassion and genuine curiosity, she helps clients develop greater insight into who they are, understand their experiences differently and make choices that feel right for them.
The therapeutic relationship is an important part of this. Feeling genuinely heard and accepted can make it easier to talk about experiences or feelings that may have been difficult to share elsewhere.
Before training as a counsellor, Jo spent decades working within the legal profession. During that time, she encountered people navigating some of the most difficult and stressful periods of their lives.
That professional experience continues to influence the way she works as a therapist. She understands that life can become complicated and messy, and that people who are ordinarily capable and resilient can reach a point where they need somewhere to talk openly without judgement.
The idea of becoming a counsellor had been with Jo for many years. Having experienced the value of counselling herself, she eventually took the opportunity to retrain and pursue the work she had long wanted to do.
Jo holds a Level 4 Diploma in Therapeutic Practice and is a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). Her additional professional development includes bereavement, trauma, anxiety, anger, shame and menopause.
Jo offers 50-minute counselling sessions at Cherry Tree Centre in Henley-on-Thames and online.
Availability: Monday to Thursday during the day, with evening appointments also available
Fee: £60 per session
Student concession: £45
Sessions don’t have to take place at exactly the same time each week. Jo understands that work and other responsibilities can make diaries unpredictable and will try to offer flexibility where possible.
No. Jo is happy to agree a frequency that works for you. You might decide to meet weekly, fortnightly or take things session by session depending on what you need and what works practically.
Yes. You don’t have to attend at the same time and on the same day every week. Jo will do her best to accommodate changing commitments within her availability.
There isn’t one answer because everybody comes to counselling for different reasons. You and Jo can review how the work is going as you progress, and ultimately you decide when you feel ready to finish.
Yes. These experiences can affect much more than the immediate loss or change. They can influence relationships, confidence, identity and how you feel about your future. Counselling gives you somewhere to process what has happened while also beginning to consider what life might look like from here.
You don’t have to wait until you can no longer cope before asking for support. Sometimes recognising that you don’t want to keep feeling this way is enough of a reason to begin counselling.
Whether you’re grieving, navigating separation or relationship difficulties, struggling with menopause or an empty nest, feeling overwhelmed by responsibility or simply wondering where you have gone in the middle of everybody else’s needs, Jo offers somewhere to begin making sense of it.
If you would like to explore counselling with Jo, contact Cherry Tree Therapy Centre by completing the form below, and our team can help you arrange your first session.