Jennifer Wei Du

Welcome

Welcome to Therapists Space, a resource space created by a therapist, for therapists.

If you're a trainee or newly qualified practitioner, you may have noticed something: while our training programs provide excellent grounding in theory and therapeutic practice, they sometimes leave us feeling overwhelmed by the practical realities of setting up and running a practice. Questions about managing finances, organizing client records, creating systems, and navigating the day-to-day logistics can feel daunting.

I created this website to share how I found my way through these challenges. My hope is that by documenting the systems I've developed and the tools I've created, I can offer you a landing place, somewhere to start forming your own ideas and approaches. You don't need to follow my path exactly, but perhaps seeing how one person navigated these waters will make your own journey feel more manageable.

If you are a client or interested in learning more about my therapeutic practice, please visit my psychotherapy website for clients.

What You'll Find Here

This website offers practical resources across several areas:

• About Me: My journey from software engineering to psychotherapy and my person-centred approach
• Website: Step-by-step guidance for creating your own professional therapy website using GitHub and AI tools
• Accounting: Practical systems for managing the financial aspects of your practice, including business account setup
• Visualisations: Visual representations of person-centred concepts including the 7 Stages of Process, Power in Relationships, the 6 Conditions, Unconditional Positive Regard and Self Development
• Community: Links to communities and resources I've found valuable in my therapeutic journey

Everything shared here is offered in a person-centred spirit, not as prescriptive rules, but as possibilities for you to consider, adapt, or reimagine in ways that fit your own unique practice and way of being as a therapist.

About Me

My journey to becoming a psychotherapist began in what might seem like an unlikely place: the world of software engineering and agile project management. For over ten years, I worked as a software engineer and agile scrum master in leading financial institutions, where I developed strong analytical thinking, problem-solving skills, and a deep understanding of how systems work.

While this career was intellectually rewarding, I felt drawn to work that engaged more directly with people and their inner worlds. This led me to begin training at the Metanoia Institute, where I spent nine years completing my MSc in Contemporary Person Centred Psychotherapy. This extensive training period allowed me to deeply immerse myself in the theory and practice of person-centred therapy, while also integrating my previous experiences in ways I hadn't anticipated.

Bringing Two Worlds Together

My background in technology has influenced my therapeutic work in unexpected ways. Throughout my training, I found myself creating publications and visual representations of person-centred psychotherapy concepts, representations that help make abstract theoretical ideas more concrete and accessible. Many of my peers and supervisors found these publications helpful for teaching students and even for use in conversations with clients.

These diagrams and visual tools became a way of bridging my two professional worlds: using systematic thinking and visual design to illuminate the depth and complexity of therapeutic theory. You'll find many of these publications in the Research & Publications section of this website.

My Therapeutic Approach

My practice is grounded in person-centred theory, which emphasizes the actualizing tendency present in all of us, the innate drive toward growth, healing, and fulfilling our potential. I work to create a therapeutic relationship characterized by genuineness, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding, trusting in each person's capacity for self-direction and self-understanding.

This same person-centred philosophy shapes how I approach sharing resources through this website. During my training and early years of practice, I experienced firsthand how overwhelming it can be to navigate the practical aspects of starting a therapy practice. Creating Therapists Space is my way of extending the person-centred values of support and non-directive guidance to fellow therapists finding their own way.

Get in Touch

I'd love to hear from you! Whether you have questions, feedback, or would like to connect about peer therapy resources, please feel free to reach out.

Create Your Website for Free

I decided to create my website by myself with assistance from AI. I checked various hosting services, their costs, as well as the support they offered. In the end, I decided to choose GitHub to host my static psychotherapy website, as it's free of charge. GitHub is a leading version control platform within the software engineering world, and its GitHub Copilot can help me create and update my website without needing to go into the code level to make changes myself.

If you're a student, you also get free access to GitHub Copilot AI Pro (with student status verified). This makes it an even more attractive option for trainees who are setting up their first professional website.

Send Session Reminders Automatically

To automate session reminders, first register for a free account at Google App Scripts using your Google account. Once registered, you can use GitHub Copilot to help you generate working scripts that can be added to your Google App Scripts project. Copilot can generate the script to read from your schedule, send personalized reminder emails, and set up time-based triggers to run automatically. This saves time and ensures consistent communication with clients, allowing you to focus more energy on the therapeutic work itself rather than administrative tasks.

Social Engineering Optimization (SEO)

Understanding your website traffic is valuable for growing your practice. Google Analytics is a free, powerful tool that helps you track how visitors find and interact with your website. After registering and adding the websites you want to monitor in Google Analytics, Google will provide you with a meta header (or tracking code) to be added into your website's <head> section. This code enables Google Analytics to track visits, user behavior, and traffic sources for your site.

Adding this meta header is essential for collecting accurate analytics data. You can ask GitHub Copilot to help you insert the code snippet into your HTML. Once set up, you’ll be able to view detailed reports about your website’s visitors, which pages are most popular, and how people are finding your site. (You can add a screenshot of the Google Analytics setup or dashboard here for illustration.)

For detailed setup instructions, visit the Google Analytics Help Center. Remember that if you're collecting visitor data, you should also add a privacy policy to your website that explains how you use Google Analytics and any other tracking tools.

Financial Management for Therapists

Managing the financial aspects of your practice is essential for sustainability. Here you'll find resources and tools to help you track income, expenses, and maintain healthy financial practices.

I will be gradually adding information about the following key areas:

• Session Tracking: Keep accurate records of client sessions
• Income Management: Monitor your earnings and payment schedules
• Expense Tracking: Record and categorize business expenses
• Tax Preparation: Resources for tax season and quarterly reporting
• Invoicing: Templates and tools for professional invoicing

Business Account

When starting my practice, I decided to register a business account with Mettle NatWest for Sole Trader. This choice was based on several practical considerations:

• Free access to FreeAgent: Mettle provides complimentary use of FreeAgent accounting software, which is fully compliant with HMRC's Making Tax Digital requirement for quarterly tax reporting through digital platforms.
• Peer recommendations: Several practitioners I know use and recommend Mettle, which gave me confidence it would be a reliable starting point for managing practice finances.
• No fees: The account is free to use, which helps keep overhead costs low when you're establishing your practice.

Visualisations

"We began before words and we will end beyond them." - Ben Okri, Birds of Heaven

Visualisation is one of the ways the psyche communicates with us. Like bodily sensations, emotions and thoughts, spontaneous inner imagery can carry implicit knowing that has not yet found words. The visualisations shared here emerged through self listening with curiosity and presence, allowing images and scenes to unfold in their own way. They are an invitation to approach inner imagery as a living dialogue with ourselves, trusting that authentic meaning arises from within.

+ Visualisation as a Psyche's Language

This concept map intends to locate Visualisation within the wider landscape of counselling and psychotherapy. It reflects my current exploration of visualisation as a spontaneous inner dialogue, one possible language in which the psyche may communicate itself. Rather than directing or interpreting what arises, this approach invites a gentle, curious and non-judgemental relationship with one's own inner selves. (by Jennifer Wei Du, 20260630)

+ Visualising Seven Stages of Process

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This visualisation represents my understanding (20210213) of Rogers' Seven Stages of Process through colours. The colours do not represent new experiences being created. Rather, they represent aspects of organismic experiencing that have always been present, gradually becoming available to awareness and integrated into the person's lived experience.

• Stage 1 - Experience is perceived in rigid black and white. There is little openness to organismic experiencing.
• Stage 2 - The person begins to move between fixed ways of experiencing, but remains largely polarised.
• Stage 3 - Different feelings and meanings become faintly perceptible, as though seen through behind a curtain.
• Stage 4 - Individual experiences can be recognised, one at a time, though they may quickly retreat again.
• Stage 5 - A wide range of feelings, emotions and meanings become accessible consciously.
• Stage 6 - The boundaries between experiences soften, and the person no longer relies on rigid structures.
• Stage 7 - Experience flows freely and transparently. There is no longer a need to hide, defend against, or fixate. Like a turtle swimming in clear water, the person moves openly within their ever changing organismic experiencing.

+ Visualising Power in Relationships

Content about power dynamics in relationships will be added here.

+ Visualising Six Conditions

Content about Carl Rogers' 6 conditions for therapeutic change will be added here.

+ Visualising Self Development

This is a view from under the sea. When I look up, I can see the sunlight of this world above the surface. Going deeper down, I access the dark valleys with lava underneath. When the whole world is trying to teach me skills to go up, to move closer to the presentational level of the world we live in, there is an intuition in my heart calling me to go down.

This is the black hole that sucks away my life energy. This is the flame that burns my body every time I get close. I don't know what's down there, but I somehow know it holds the truth of my life. So I let go of all the safety buoyancy. I was burned many, many times.

And one day, I suddenly understood. These valleys are my existential valleys. These flames are agony. To be able to stay with this pain without trying to deny, distort, or run away, that is what presence really means.

When presence reaches deep, it is like roots growing into our core self, where energy and creativity can be channeled from personal depth all the way to the surface world, potentially reaching our clients and the people around us.

+ Visualising Dimensions of Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR)

Are you wanting to offer peace, acceptance, or unconditional positive regard (UPR) while at the same time hoping they will feel better?

The diagrams use a mathematical metaphor to explore UPR while faced with different dimensions of experiencing. A point represents acceptance of one experience. A line represents acceptance of a range of experiences. A surface represents the ability to hold different, even conflicting experiences at the same time. As the dimensions increase, URP does not become "better"; rather, it gains more freedom to include the richness and complexity of human experience. The final dimension asks a different question. What if unconditional positive regard is not only about accepting individual feelings, but also about accepting the way those feelings are organised? Some people experience themselves as integrated and coherent. Others live with dissociation, conflicting parts, or enduring internal tensions. Can your UPR remain truly unconditional, whether integration happens, partly happens, or never happens?

Communities and Resources

Throughout my journey as a therapist, I've found valuable support and inspiration from various communities and resources. Here are some that I've been following and recommend to fellow practitioners who might be interested.

Professional Organizations

Peer Support Groups