Rachel Evans is a Registered Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (MBACP), offering face-to-face counselling in Buckhurst Hill and online counselling.
Before becoming a counsellor, Rachel trained and worked across adult, children’s and mental health nursing. This background gives her a particular understanding of people struggling with health anxiety, especially when physical sensations, frightening thoughts and uncertainty about health have begun to take over everyday life.
Rachel also supports people experiencing anxiety and overthinking, relationship difficulties, attachment patterns, low self-esteem, people-pleasing, difficulties with boundaries, workplace stress, depression, grief and loss. Many of the people who come to her have spent a long time trying to cope by themselves and may appear to be managing well from the outside while internally feeling anxious, overwhelmed, emotionally exhausted, or simply not quite themselves anymore.
Counselling offers somewhere to stop holding everything together for a while and begin understanding what is actually going on.
A physical sensation catches your attention, and you begin wondering what it means. You try to reassure yourself, perhaps by searching online, checking your body, asking someone else what they think, or seeking medical reassurance. You may feel better for a while, but then another sensation appears, or the doubt returns: What if something has been missed? What if this time it really is serious?
Health anxiety can become an exhausting cycle, and Rachel has a particular interest in supporting people who find themselves caught in it. Her nursing background means conversations about health don’t feel unfamiliar to her, while counselling provides somewhere to explore what happens around the worry: the thoughts it triggers, the behaviours you use to try to feel safe, and the anxiety underneath it.
Rachel can draw on Person-Centred Therapy and CBT to help you understand the relationship between your thoughts, feelings and behaviours, while her attachment-based approach allows the work to go deeper when appropriate. The aim isn’t to dismiss your concerns or tell you to “stop worrying”, but to understand why uncertainty feels so difficult and help you develop a different relationship with the anxiety.
Sometimes there isn’t one particular health concern; your mind simply seems unable to switch off. You might replay conversations, imagine everything that could go wrong, analyse decisions repeatedly or feel as though you need to think something through one more time before you can relax.
For some people, anxiety can also involve intrusive thoughts or OCD-type patterns that feel particularly frightening because the thoughts are unwanted. Trying not to think about something can sometimes make it seem even louder.
Rachel helps clients slow these patterns down and become curious about what is happening rather than immediately being pulled into the next cycle of worry. CBT can help you notice connections between thoughts, feelings and behaviours, but Rachel doesn’t work from CBT alone. She is interested in you as a whole person and in understanding why particular fears or patterns may have become so powerful.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that you don’t recognise the pattern. You know you say yes when you want to say no, worry excessively about disappointing people, or constantly look to other people for reassurance. You may understand exactly what you’re doing but still find it incredibly difficult to stop.
Rachel has a Level 5 Diploma in Attachment-Based Psychotherapy, which informs the way she helps clients understand how earlier relationships and experiences can continue to influence how they see themselves and relate to other people today.
Perhaps you learned that keeping other people happy helped relationships feel safer. Maybe conflict feels unbearable, boundaries feel selfish, or another person’s disappointment immediately makes you question yourself. Rather than simply telling you to set better boundaries or stop people-pleasing, therapy can help you understand why these patterns developed in the first place. Once something begins to make sense, there can be more choice about whether you still need it.
Rachel often works with people who have become very good at getting on with things. You may be the person everyone else relies on: you cope, organise, care, work and keep going. Somewhere amongst everyone else’s needs, however, you may have lost touch with your own.
Perhaps you struggle to know what you want, feel guilty when you put yourself first or worry that having boundaries will make you selfish or difficult. Constantly accommodating everybody else can eventually leave you emotionally exhausted, resentful or disconnected from yourself.
Counselling provides a place where you don’t have to look after anyone else. Rachel can help you explore what you need, recognise the patterns that keep pulling you back into old roles, and begin finding ways of relating to others that don’t always require you to put yourself last.
Relationship difficulties don’t always begin with a dramatic event. Sometimes you simply notice that the same things keep happening: you become anxious when someone pulls away, avoid difficult conversations, struggle to trust, become overly responsible for another person’s feelings or find yourself repeating similar patterns in different relationships.
Attachment-based therapy can help make sense of why relationships affect us as deeply as they do. Rachel doesn’t use attachment to put you into a category or give you another label. Instead, you can explore how your experiences may have shaped what you expect from relationships, what helps you feel secure, and what happens when that security feels threatened.
Understanding these patterns can help you approach both your relationships and yourself with greater compassion. You can also read more about relationship anxiety and the patterns that can develop around closeness and reassurance.
Rachel also supports people experiencing grief and bereavement and significant changes in their lives. Loss can affect far more than how much you miss someone; it can change routines, relationships, roles, identity and your sense of what the future was supposed to look like.
There is no correct timetable for grief. Rachel offers somewhere you can talk honestly about what you have lost without feeling that you should be coping differently or need to protect the people around you from how you really feel.
Rachel wants you to feel that you can breathe, slow down and be yourself. You don’t need to arrive knowing what you want from therapy, organise your thoughts beforehand or find the perfect way of explaining what is wrong.
She creates a warm, calm and welcoming environment and listens with curiosity, care and compassion, allowing you to work at your own pace without feeling rushed or pressured.
Rachel’s approach is Person-Centred and integrative, drawing particularly on CBT and attachment-based therapy. Person-Centred Therapy means Rachel sees you as the expert on your own life; her role isn’t to tell you what you should do, but to provide a relationship in which you can explore your experiences openly and without judgement.
CBT can help you notice connections between your thoughts, feelings and behaviours and identify patterns that may be contributing to anxiety or keeping you stuck. Rachel’s attachment-based training allows you to explore more deeply when that would be helpful, including how earlier experiences and relationships may still influence how you respond today.
Rather than following one fixed method, Rachel brings these approaches together according to what you need. Sometimes the work may focus on practical ways of responding differently to anxiety now; at other times, it may be important to understand where the anxiety or relationship pattern came from in the first place.
Rachel brings an unusual breadth of healthcare experience to her counselling work. Alongside her therapeutic qualifications, she is a Registered Adult Nurse, Registered Children’s Nurse and Registered Mental Health Nurse. She also holds a BSc (Hons) in Social Sciences and a Postgraduate Diploma in Nurse Education.
This professional background particularly informs her understanding of clients experiencing health anxiety. She understands that simply being told not to worry about your health rarely makes anxiety disappear. Her counselling work allows her to look beyond symptoms alone and consider the emotional, psychological and relational experiences that may be contributing to how someone feels.
Rachel also works as a Secondary School Counsellor, bringing further experience of supporting young people with their emotional wellbeing.
Rachel is a Registered Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (MBACP).
Her qualifications include:
Rachel works integratively, drawing primarily on Person-Centred Therapy, CBT and attachment-based approaches.
Yes. Rachel has a particular interest in health anxiety and brings a background in adult, children’s and mental health nursing alongside her counselling training. Therapy can help you understand the cycle of worry, checking, reassurance-seeking and intrusive thoughts that can develop around concerns about your health.
Rachel works with anxiety, overthinking, intrusive thoughts and OCD-type anxiety. She draws on Person-Centred Therapy, CBT and attachment-based approaches to help you understand both what may be maintaining the anxiety now and, where helpful, what may sit underneath it.
Yes. Rachel works with people-pleasing, boundaries, low self-worth and recurring relationship patterns. Her attachment-based approach can help you explore how earlier experiences and relationships may be influencing the way you relate to yourself and other people today.
You don’t need to arrive with everything worked out or know exactly where to begin. Rachel offers a calm, welcoming space where you can work at your own pace, starting with whatever feels most important to you.
You don’t need to wait until anxiety feels unmanageable or have a clear idea of what you want from counselling. You may simply know that the way you’re feeling isn’t working for you anymore.
Whether you’re struggling with health anxiety, overthinking, relationships, people-pleasing or feeling as though you’ve lost touch with yourself, Rachel can help you understand what is happening and begin finding a way forward.
If you would like to explore working with Rachel, complete the enquiry form below and our team can help you arrange your first session.