Why I took over a twenty three year old therapy centre and started again

Gavin Demurger-Jones, Counsellor and Centre Director at held, and Ali Cardosi, one of the centre’s founding practitioners, reflect on the rebrand, the handover, and what they hope held becomes.

It started, as many things do, with a simple problem. Towards the end of 2025, Gavin Demurger-Jones decided he wanted to move out of his home office and into a proper space. He also wanted to connect with other therapists working in the area. So he did what felt natural to him, someone who had spent twenty years in advertising building teams and bringing people together. He emailed every therapist he could find in the local directories, directly and personally, and asked whether anyone might be interested in sharing a space or simply making a connection.

The response surprised him. A handful of people were interested in the space. But far more wrote back to say they were hungry for community. They wanted to meet other therapists, to feel less alone in their work.

“There was an overwhelming response,” Gavin says. “People just wanted more connection.”

So he set up a networking event. It was the first he had ever organised, though it did not feel that way. “I’ve run teams of over thirty five people,” he says. “Advertising is a people environment. Stepping into that space felt very familiar, very natural.” The event was, by his own description, a roaring success.

It was at one of those early gatherings that he met Ali Cardosi.

—

Ali had been at the Haywards Heath Counselling Centre since the beginning. She co-founded it twenty three years ago with a friend and colleague, building it slowly into a respected local practice, one that at its peak had attracted fifteen to twenty therapists and had even been commissioned to run a service for local GP patients during the pandemic. But more recently, she had begun to think about what came next.

“I’d reached a stage where I was ready to move into semi-retirement,” she says. “I wanted to hand over the reins and ensure the centre went into really, really good hands.”

When Gavin’s email arrived, inviting local therapists to a community meetup, something clicked. “I was so taken with what an innovative idea it was,” Ali says. “It made me think: if this man is this innovative, maybe he could apply that dynamism to the centre.”

She reached out to him. The rest, as she puts it, is history.

—

For Gavin, the moment Ali raised the possibility of a handover was not immediately exciting. It was something closer to shock.

“It wasn’t what I had imagined,” he says. “I had imagined something as simple as: find a room, rent a room.” Running a centre was a different proposition entirely. “There was a degree of panic, fear, uncertainty. Someone was essentially asking me: do you actually want this, or not?”

He spoke to people he trusted. More than one of them said the same thing back to him: but this is what you want to do, isn’t it?

“And I thought: oh. Yeah. It is.”

The excitement came after that. The chance to draw on everything he had built across two careers, first in advertising, then as a practising counsellor with a full client list, and to pour it into something with twenty three years of roots already in the ground.

When he first walked into the building, the feeling was hard to put into words. “It was a nice space,” he says. “But it was quiet. A bit too quiet. It was like the building had fallen asleep. Like it was a shadow of its former self.”

—

The first thing he knew he wanted to change was the name.

Not immediately. The Haywards Heath Counselling Centre did exactly what it said on the tin, and there was something reassuring about that. But the more he sat with it, the more the name felt like it belonged to a different idea of what therapy is for.

“It could be a doctor’s surgery,” he says. “And I wanted to move away from the idea that people come to counselling because something is wrong with them, or because something bad has happened. I want to normalise therapy. I want people to see it the way they see going to the gym.”

He wanted a name that carried that. Something that spoke to the everyday reality of being human, of needing space to reflect, to be heard, to make sense of things. The name held emerged from that thinking. “We all need to feel held from time to time,” Gavin says. “And the more complicated the thing we are exploring, the more we need it.” The amount of holding changes as you move through therapy, he explains. Some people arrive needing a great deal. Some need only a light touch. Most travel somewhere between the two over the course of their work.

For Ali, the name landed with a warmth she had not entirely expected. “I had an initial hesitation, to be honest,” she says. “But then I felt a really warm glow. held seemed to imply a sense of safety, that people coming here could have their difficulties securely and warmly held, and that they needn’t worry what they bring.”

—

What held is trying to become is harder to summarise in a single sentence, and perhaps that is the point.

Gavin is clear that he does not want to run a space that is simply a room to rent. He wants to build something, a genuine community of practitioners, a place in Mid Sussex where people know they can turn when life gets complicated. And life, he is at pains to say, gets complicated for everyone.

“Therapy is for people grappling with real life,” he says. “People caring for young children and ageing parents at the same time. People navigating the stress and politics of corporate life alongside the complexity of their families. People starting to look back at their own childhoods and understand what shaped them.” He pauses. “That is a lot of people. That is most people.”

Gavin’s own vision for twelve months from now is both practical and ambitious. Rooms full of therapists and clients, yes. But beyond that, something bigger. “If anyone in Haywards Heath or across Mid Sussex thinks about therapy, I want held to be the first place they turn to,” he says. “I want that to be the instinct. They think about getting support, and they come to us. They look at the breadth of expertise we have under one roof and they find someone who can help them.” The connected community of practitioners matters too, he adds, even if getting everyone in the same room takes time. But the north star is clear: held as the place Mid Sussex reaches for first.

Ali shares his ambition. “I envisage the centre becoming a hub for therapies of all kinds,” she says. “And maybe workshops too. Gavin thinks outside the box. That is what makes me so confident about what he will build here.”

—

He finishes with something that feels less like a pitch and more like a belief.

“Therapy is a unique space,” he says. “In every other part of life, when you see a professional, they have the answers. A therapist doesn’t. They sit with you and help you figure out your own life. What happened. What’s happening now. What might happen next. They are not sold on you being a certain way. All they want is for you to become aware of yourself, and what you might want.”

He lets that settle.

“That is where we begin to change. That is where we start to take control of our own lives.”

held is open for enquiries now at heldtherapy.space