Rory Singer

Founder & Clinical Director, New Road Psychotherapy

Rory Singer

Founder & Clinical Director

Most people who come to New Road have been thinking about it for a while. They know something needs to change. They have known this for some time.

I understand this not only from thirty-five years of sitting with people in exactly that moment, but also from having lived versions of it myself. Whatever insight I have has been earned slowly and is still being earned. I am further along than I was. I am not at the end.

This is not a practice built on theory. It is built on what those years have taught us in the room and in life about how people work, how patterns form, and what it genuinely takes to change.

Early formation

In my early twenties, I spent five years as a monk in the Thai Forest tradition of Buddhism. It was not a retreat from the world but an immersion in something more demanding: close, sustained attention to the workings of the mind. To desire and fear.

To the stories we construct around our experience, and how those stories both protect us and keep us stuck. That training left its mark. It is why the work at NRP tends to be unhurried: we have slowly learned that hurry is usually a form of avoidance.

The clinical years

After leaving the monastery, I trained as a psychotherapist and spent a decade in the IVF and reproductive medicine unit at Hammersmith Hospital. Sitting with people at the edge of hope, and sometimes beyond it, taught me something no training manual can convey: that the capacity to remain present with what cannot be fixed is not a clinical skill. It is a human one. It is what NRP is built on.

Three years at King’s College Hospital, working with male survivors and perpetrators of child sexual abuse, made something else clear. Shame, when it goes unwitnessed, reproduces harm. Genuine change depends not on technique but on the quality of the relationship in which difficult things are held without reflex condemnation or flinching.

A decade as Course Leader for the Diploma in Therapeutic Counselling at Crawley College gave me the chance to pass this on. The values at NRP are not mine alone. They have been built, tested, and carried forward by the therapists we have trained and by the work we have done together. That matters to me. What I have learned is only useful if it travels further than I can go alone.

How we understand the work

People come to therapy carrying patterns that once made perfect sense. The anxiety that kept them safe. The withdrawal that shielded them from further hurt. The vigilance was entirely rational, given what they had endured. These are not faults. They are wise adaptations that have simply outlived their purpose.

Knowing changes how we work. We are not here to correct you. We are here to help you understand yourself honestly and, from that understanding, choose differently. That is a slower road than most people expect, but it is also a more lasting one.

What we stand for

I founded New Road over twenty years ago because I wanted to create a place where genuinely good work could be done, where the environment itself reflected what therapy is trying to do, and where the welcome at the door and the care in the room were part of the same thing.

NRP is not a crisis service. It is a place for people who take their inner life seriously. The qualities that make this work effective, such as honesty, patience, and the willingness to stay present with difficulty, are not techniques. They are values. They are what we ask of ourselves and what we try to make possible for the people who come to us.

I am less interested in personal growth as an end in itself than in what growth ultimately demands: humility and generosity. Humility to accept the world as it is. Generosity to let go of what we have outgrown. These are not soft virtues. They are the hardest work I know.

They are what we do.