Testimonials

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 David was very good with my visually impaired son, understood his needs and provided accurate support where necessary. 

I pray he still goes to the various schools providing support as the teachers in my son's case didn't have a clue of how to support him. David's intervention made all the difference in the right direction.

I am sure we were given much more than we required. We continued to get input from David even after moving to London.

 I have been having counselling for anxiety which I have been living with for some years. When I first started I didn't know what to expect as it had got to the stage where I struggled to talk to anyone about how I was feeling. 

Thanks to David's patience and brilliant advice I am starting to find ways to cope with my anxiety and to be able to see a way to move forward. 

I feel that David offers a great service and I don't know where I would be without his support. 

For several years. sight loss left me with a lot of anger, depression and anxiety. Luckily, I came across David’s services at a time I really needed a mentor to guide me through my grief and struggles. With extensive therapy, I have been able to see my health conditions as a driving force rather than a setback or limitation. David helped me believe that there is hope and that life has so much more in store for me. Before I started counselling, I had no idea about the resources and help there is in the UK for the visually impaired/ blind. At the time of starting therapy with David I was 18, and was newly diagnosed with panic disorder too. The thought of going outside would scare me a lot and I'd suffer with regular panic attacks everyday.

A few years on, through shifting my perspective into a more positive and helpful one, and by using mindfulness techniques and spiritual approaches, I am not only panic disorder free, but also free of the negative thought patterns and debilitating beliefs that had been embedded into my head. I feel super confident to travel long distances on my own with the help of my symbol cane, and travel assistance. I am not afraid or embarrassed to ask for help when I need it anymore also. I am due to be living independently soon, and am feeling super hopeful and positive about my future. These are just some examples of how far I’ve come over the past 5 years. Although healing takes time and it is messy work, I’ve learnt the importance of having some one to talk to regularly that shared similar experiences to me, and how much that really helped fuel me in my healing journey. 

I think David’s counselling service is such a gift of hope and support. I believe this offers so many young people and parents and families hope for the future when sometimes you can feel at your lowest. 

David had so much expertise to offer and he had a great way to get my daughter to engage and feel at ease and open up to discuss issues that children don’t always recognise but it can come out through play games and music. David was a huge support from the time we met him and then right up to and after a diagnosis of autism.  

I would recommend David any time to parents with visually impaired children, and encourage ethnic minority families to speak up and learn to accept help. 

Experience has proven that ethnic minority families are often in denial when their children have disabilities. Instead of looking for diagnoses and solutions, some are in total denial while others say they will pray for God to help them. And by the time they finally think there is a problem, it might be too late to get better support. 

I remember being asked on several occasions how I got involved with David when my child has no problem? I have never stopped saying 'thank you' for all the support you offered and are definitely continuing to offer.

When I first came to see David, I was struggling a lot with my sight and coming to terms with things. 

Since seeing him, I have been so much more positive and am able to cope with life in general. I really cannot thank David enough for all he has done. I am able to get on with life and have learnt how to cope with my impairment. 

I would not be where I am without the support and help from David. Thank you for everything.

As a person who lost her sight suddenly without any warning, I was left devastated. With no desire to do anything else but stay at home.  I had lost my otherwise strong will, drive and passion to achieve a lot in life. When I was offered counselling with David Best I didn’t know if I was ready because that meant I was admitting to myself that I was going to spend the rest of my life being blind. But after very few sessions with him I could feel weight lifting off my shoulders. I learned that I can still achieve great things in life despite the fact that I was now blind. And even though the things that I could achieve now were different than the ones I wanted to before, didn’t mean that they were any less or greater. In the years I was receiving Counselling from David it wasn’t easy for me as I was going through different stages of grief but with his professionalism combined with compassion, I was able to reach the point of accepting my new life and even becoming more patient. If it was not for  counselling I don’t know how much time it would have taken for me to realise that I needed to let go of the past and the grief so I can be happy inside and out. Thanks to Counselling support I now only focus on the current time and the future. I let go of the past and what it could have been if I hadn’t lost  my sight and I am actually proud of what I am capable of doing as a blind person. Thank you,

My name is Sonia R and mum.  My  son is called William M.  Will has ASD, Bilateral Duane’s Syndrome, Hypermetropia, cerebral VI with a inferior field defect.We have been seeing David Best since 2016.Throughout primary and secondary school he was misunderstood and bullying occurred regularly because of his complex needs.  This resulted in losing confidence and unable to trust anyone outside home. It took William a long time to trust David and open up.  He lacked focus and the social skills required to engage in a meaningful conversation.David has helped William enormously to be able to trust and feel confident enough to talk openly about how he feels, he is much more communicate than ever before.David has installed in William that he can do things that he thought he couldn’t do and try new things. It has been such a blessing and influence in our lives to have David as a councillor he is a very special person to have these skills and is invaluable to any one he may help in the future.  I would highly recommended David as a counsellor.

I had counselling with David for around 5 years. I found that amount of time extremely useful as when I started counselling, I’d been living with a lot of anxiety for years that I’d never been able to deal with. It took a while to be able to even begin to understand what was going on in my head as I had a lot of complicated feelings from going away to a residential school for the blind which was a long way from home. David helped me talk through my experiences and really understand how I was feeling emotionally. He also helped me to get more connected with things going on locally to me as I was feeling really isolated. He was so patient and it just felt like he really understood. I think it helps that he’s visually impaired as well because he has more of an understanding of the challenges around visual impairment and also the services that are available to support people who are visually impaired. For example, he told me about the service that Guide Dogs offer called My Guide which Means I can be paired up with someone who can take me out so I don’t feel so isolated. I definitely feel that I would never have made the amount of progress building my confidence and being able to access more social things if I hadn’t had that extra time to really work through my feelings and build up trust in other people but also importantly in myself as well. I feel that counselling with David has really changed my life and given me the time and support to be able to improve my mental health and work out what is best for me. Mental health isn’t something that can just get better overnight. It's complicated sometimes and can take time and with the right amount of time and understanding it’s possible to get to a point where you feel stronger and can cope with more and I don’t feel I would be anywhere close to that point without the counselling I have received from David.

My son Alex first met David in 2007, he was being severely bullied at his school at the time (and later diagnosed with PTSD and autism).   Alex has complex needs and various health conditions as well as his visual impairment. To be honest, both of us were at the end of coping with things.  Alex was self-harming because of everything he had been through, his self-esteem was at rock bottom, he hated himself, was very angry towards himself and others.  Things had got so bad at his School, I had to take him out of it as he was coming home with bruising on him.  The school not only denied that the bullying was happening, but also disagreed with his recent diagnosis of Autism. Denial of problems by the school is an underestimation.David, supported Alex to get into the right school environment, which was quite a long, drawn-out battle of over a year.  This made a huge difference to Alex, attending a school that met his requirements, and welcomed input from outside agencies.Over the years, David has worked closely with Alex. He has shown incredible patience, and given much time that other counselors would not have done, this fact is extremely important, as Alex really required this extensive amount of time.  Although there are other factors, the largest impact on Alex’s self-esteem has been his poor eyesight (he is registered partially sighted).    It makes him believe that he is vulnerable, weak, and of no value to either himself or anyone else. The fact that David has a visual impairment himself, has inspired Alex to understand that he is important to people, and can achieve more value in this world.  He has shown Alex how to turn inability into ability – not to concentrate on what he can not do but on what he can.  David also overcame the problem that Alex has with males (I had left an abusive marriage; the abuse had been directed at myself as well as Alex and the other siblings).  So, David also did some family sessions as well.I am so grateful for all the help that David has given over the years, and how he has enabled Alex to achieve so much more than I thought possible. 

Before I met David, I wasn’t a safe person to be around.  I kept my distance from a lot of people, mostly against other males around me, weather they were part of my family or not.  It would also include who to trust in friends, and it wouldn’t of mattered if it was from school, college or where I go now – Roebuck Centre, for people like myself who has autism or anything else which I’m not going to name as its personal to them. 

My own past, wasn’t pleasant to begin with, but over the years as I got older until the moment David came into my life.  When we first met, we didn’t get along at first, and mum came in with me.  As time moved on, I very slowly start seeing him by myself. 

But since David was a male, I had a hard time trusting him and getting along with him by myself.  I had a lot of trust issues, due to my experience from my step dad, and my father.  Along with trusting student males at school and college at the same time.  I was very selective who to trust, who to get along with were I went, in the mid-point of when I was having my counseling sessions, this slowly change with David’s help, and his suggestions of how for me to cope with dealing with people, as I found it hard to do it myself.

Despite everything I’ve been through, throughout my life, I wouldn’t be the man who you are witnessing today.  If David hadn’t come into my life I would of done more harm to myself, and others as well.  I’m now a book writer, making tributes (music videos) for friends and family, and I’m a lot happier now than I was before meeting David.  Ps despite my eyesight, I have the gift in photography and my behaviour patterns are a lot more better today than they were before.”

When I first attended counselling, I went into it not expecting to much as before being referred to David I had experienced a number of counsellors who I struggled to connect with due to them not really knowing what I was going through as they were not living a visual impairment themselves.When I started receiving counselling with David, I felt comfortable straight away. This was because David lives with a visual impairment too. For me this really helped me to open up to him. When I first started seeing David, looking back there were sessions where I did not feel like talking that much and preferred playing games such as hangman. As a result of David allowing me to do this I had the  time and space to open up and talk about my feelings towards what was going on for me in that moment.I saw David on and off from the age of 13 to the end of my first year at college. Within that time, I can recognise that I have overcome many challenges and developed as a person, coming on leaps and bounds throughout those 4 years. This is because David allowed me to open up in my own time and never rushed me to do this. Never did I think that I would get to where I am today (moving out and being fully independent) this is all the counselling I received from David