About Daniel Esparraguera

Before I became a counsellor I spent twenty years in sales, marketing and management. I learned that people are complex and their reasons for how and why they are in the world are even more so — I didn't have a framework for that understanding then, so I just worked hard and hoped that would help.

As my career changed direction I became curious about how and why we form the relationships we do, what motivates people, what holds them back — and that eventually led me toward psychology. I tried a year of a psychology degree before realising it wasn't quite right for me, and found my way to integrative counselling training at Whitelands College in London. I qualified in 2007 with a BSc (Hons) and have been practising since.

I began with a training placement at HMP Wandsworth, where I stayed for a year after qualifying. Working there drove a reflection about my own motives for becoming a therapist. I had been lucky enough to explore my own change — from business person to trainee counsellor — and sitting with people who had far fewer choices about their own lives sharpened something I've carried ever since.

That kind of exploration, understanding who you are and how you can change, shouldn't be down to luck. It should be available to everyone.

From there I moved to an NHS health centre in South London — a multi-GP site, working with GP and self-referred clients for up to twelve sessions on the cusp of what became the IAPT model. That experience of brief, structured work within a clinical framework helped shape how I think about time in therapy and what's actually possible within it.

Private practice followed, on and off, running alongside other work. When Covid arrived and changed our lives it felt right to get involved. I found a role setting up and running counselling services in hospitals and universities across London and vaccination centres in the South East and Scotland.

That period was unlike anything that came before in my practice. I developed a clinical steadiness that had some roots in my earlier work and a very clear sense of what I was there to do.

More recently I've built a workplace counselling practice working with employers across healthcare, education, retail and corporate settings. I'm developing an area of my practice to support sports performers and athletes who are interested in their relationship with their sport and how a deeper understanding of themselves will reflect on their pursuit and their life too.

After discovering that every client I had worked with over three years had raised sleep as a concern at some point, I trained in CBT-I — Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for sleep difficulty, approved by NICE and delivered by the NHS — at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences.

The thread through all of it is this — you have to get to know the person in front of you. You build a therapeutic relationship, one that's different to any other you have or have had. The therapeutic relationship grounds and drives the work. I feel lucky to have found this work. It's given me the chance to explore how people change — and I feel privileged to hear and learn from those interactions.