Stop overthinking

I want to tell you something most people in my profession won't share on their About page.

I didn't seek counselling because I had it all figured out.

I found it because, for most of my life, I didn't.

The Kid Who Was Always the Follower

I grew up in a state of quiet confusion about who I was.

Not the dramatic kind you see in films. Nothing that would have stood out to anyone looking in from the outside. Just the slow, grinding, daily experience of never quite trusting myself. Always looking to someone else for the signal of how to behave, what to think, who to be.

I was always the follower.

I had what psychologists call a huge gap between the organismic self — the real you, the one underneath all the conditioning — and the ideal self — the version of you that's been shaped by expectations, fear, and years of learning that acceptance is conditional.

I lived almost entirely in my ideal self. Performing. Adapting. Shrinking.

And because I was so far from my own instincts, my mind never quieted down. The overthinking was constant. The self-doubt was relentless. The fear of getting things wrong was so embedded in everything I did that I eventually stopped doing much at all.

I developed agoraphobia. Anxiety. Paranoia. There were stretches of my life where leaving the house felt genuinely impossible. Where the world outside felt like a threat I wasn't equipped to handle.

I want you to really hear that — because if you're sitting with something similar right now, I need you to know that's where I started.

The 3 am Hours

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I couldn't sleep.

Not occasionally. Chronically. Night after night, lying in the dark with a brain that refused to stop, turning everything over and over and never arriving anywhere useful.

So I started writing.

Not because I thought I was a writer. Not because I had a plan. Just because I needed somewhere to put everything that was in my head, and the page didn't judge me for it.

And something happened.

In those 3 am hours, in the quiet that the rest of the world wasn't awake to interrupt, I started to find things. Characters who said the things I couldn't say out loud. Stories that let me explore the parts of myself I didn't have language for yet. Poetry — raw, private, sometimes clumsy poetry — that let feelings out of the place they'd been locked for years.

Felix was born in those hours. So was a time travel story I'm still working on. So was The Delivery Man — a darkly comic thriller about a man who was invisible his entire life, until one morning everything changed.

Well, if I’m honest, Felix was born long before then. It was just these moments of insomnia when I started to write the tales I had created down.

I didn't know it then, but I was doing something therapeutic. I was giving my inner world a place to exist outside of my own head. And in doing that, I was slowly, quietly, beginning to find out who I actually was.

Writing didn't fix me. It wasn’t that quick fix that we all crave when we feel desperate. When it feels like the anxiety has control of us and we can’t see an end to it. But it held me together long enough for me to find what I did. Those moments gave me back some autonomy without me even realising. I showed myself I could cope.

Viktor Frankl and the Space Between

When I eventually began to seek help — real help, professional help and started to study to become a therapist, I came across Viktor Frankl.

Frankl was a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who developed Logotherapy: a form of therapy built on the idea that the deepest human need is not comfort or pleasure, but meaning.

He wrote something that I have never forgotten:

"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our responses lie our growth and our freedom."

I had spent my entire life reacting. Responding automatically to fear, to expectation, to the invisible rules I had absorbed without ever choosing them. I even started to plan for the anxiety even before I had left the house.

Frankl was telling me there was a space. That I could learn to live in that space. That the space was where I actually existed — not in the fear, not in the performance, but in the moment of genuine choice.

That idea changed the direction of my life.

My Own Personal Rebellion

Against everything that held me back

Carl Rogers gave me the rest. His humanistic approach — the unconditional positive regard, the belief in every person's capacity to grow when given the right conditions — became the foundation of how I now work with the people who come to me.

Because I believe, from lived experience, that most of us are not broken in the way that we believe in those moments.

We are just very, very far from ourselves.

And the journey back starts with the first step.

From That Person to This One

I went from someone who could not leave his house to a qualified counsellor with an Honours degree and a Postgraduate Certificate in Childhood and Youth Development. Something I am very proud of myself for.

I graduated on a stage, in front of thousands of people.

I want you to sit with that for a moment — not because I want to impress you, but because the distance between those two versions of the same person is the whole point of everything I do now.

That journey was not linear. It was not clean. It involved stumbling, backtracking, sitting with discomfort for longer than felt survivable, and slowly, painstakingly learning to trust the voice inside me that I had been drowning out for decades.

But it happened.

And it is still happening, because this work is never finished — it just gets quieter, and more honest, and more yours.

What I Do Now

I created keithgumbrell.co.uk — and specifically this corner of it — as a place for people who are somewhere on that same journey.

Maybe you're at the beginning, still not entirely sure what the problem is, just knowing that something feels off. Maybe you've been in the dark for a long time, and you're just starting to look for the door. Maybe you're further along, and you're ready to do the deeper work.

Wherever you are, you're welcome here.

I offer

One-to-one Counselling — I am a trained Integrative counsellor. Person-centred, humanistic therapy is at my core. I work with adult clients who are ready to stop being lost in their inner world and start understanding it, remotely via Phone or Video.

Coaching — For people who know what they want to change but need support, structure, and someone genuinely in their corner to help them get there. (Coming 2027).

Story Workshops — Because I have learned, through my own experience and my training, that the stories we tell about ourselves are the most powerful force in our lives. These workshops help you find, examine, and — where necessary — rewrite yours.

Books and Poetry — Because sometimes the most therapeutic thing in the world is to find yourself in someone else's fictional words. My writing is here too, because I have never believed that the creative and the clinical should be kept in separate rooms. On this site, they are merely sitting in different Corners.

A Final Word

If you take nothing else from this page, take this:

The version of you that is reading this — the one that is struggling, or lost, or simply tired of the noise — is not the finished version.

I know, because I was that person. By reading this, you are already taking that first step.

And I wrote my way through the dark, one 3 am page at a time, until I found enough of myself to help others find themselves too.

That's what this Corner is for.

— Keith