"Building work and change in waiting room"

Extensive renovation work started about a month ago inside the building.

The first appointment since the work began made the entire experience extremely difficult and challenging for me. I felt extremely exposed, uncomfortable and unsafe being made to wait in a large, open area where a lot of people using a very wide selection of services and workmen were about. I felt I had no privacy or dignity. Usually I would wait in a small, safe, contained waiting area on the same floor as my therapist so the two experiences were night and day. 

The next appointment became a telephone appointment because the therapist didn’t have a room or space in the building for me to have a face to face appointment. I found the experience to be unsatisfactory and unhelpful as I tend to feel more supported and understood in a face to face setting. I really felt it was a waste of a previous appointment.

The following appointment was again face to face because the therapist had thankfully secured a room for the appointment. Once again, the waiting area was the same as that first experience when the work had just started although it was much busier in this occasion. It left me feeling extremely overwhelmed and I spent the time fighting a very strong urge to just leave and go home. The temporary room had building works going on in the outside corridor with banging, hammering and drilling ongoing which was very off-putting and distracting. It definitely affected the quality of the therapeutic intervention and my ability to partake fully.

The next appointment was the same as the last. It was overwhelming, unsettling and felt counterproductive for someone like me, having agoraphobia, OCD and GAD with traits of PTSD, to be put in that psychologically unsafe, unstable and unnecessarily chaotic environment. The only thing that made me stick with the it was the therapist herself who did her very best to make the experiences tolerable where and when she could.