About Us | Psychotherapy Institute

About Psychotherapy Institute

At Psychotherapy Institute, you'll find a transformational pathway of learning — with qualifications recognised both nationally and internationally.

Choose the route that suits you: a 3-year Counselling qualification or our 4-year Psychotherapy Diploma.
We train students to become Professional Counsellors, UKCP Registered Psychotherapists, and internationally accredited Certified Transactional Analysts.

Our Level 7 Diploma (Masters Equivalent) leads to SCoPEd Column C status with UKCP.

We teach Transactional Analysis through a family systemic lens, so our graduates leave confident working with individuals, couples, families and groups.

Our Training Spaces
Our training rooms sit within a relaxed, comfortable environment, with capacity for up to 18 trainees, multiple breakout areas, and kitchens on each floor. Tea, coffee and biscuits are provided at every break — and Bolton town centre's shops, cafés and restaurants are all close by.

Our Approach
We teach Transactional Analysis with a systemic focus, so our trainees graduate ready to work not only with individuals but with couples, families and groups. Equality, diversity and social justice sit at the centre of our training culture — not as an add-on, but as a genuine foundation for how we teach and how we expect our graduates to practise.

From 2017-2026, our founder Susie was a Core Tutor at the Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy (MIP), teaching on their Level 7, four-year training programme. When MIP made the decision to close their programme in 2022, Susie was left with a choice: step away from training entirely, or build something of her own. She chose to build.

Psychotherapy Institute was launched in Jan 2023 by Susie Hewitt TSTA-P; MSc Psychotherapy; UKCP Registered Psychotherapist. We became a UKATA Registered Training Establishment in 2024, and endorsed to train students to become UKCP Registered Psychotherapists, Certified Transactional Analysts (CTA) and Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analysts (TSTA).

Why Bolton

The decision to base the Institute in Bolton, in the north of Greater Manchester, was deliberate. Manchester city centre and the south of the city already has an established concentration of psychotherapists and training providers. North Manchester and Bolton didn't — and Susie wanted to bring high-quality, rigorous training and low-cost therapeutic support to a community that needed it, rather than adding to an area that already had it.

Why Systemic Practice

Susie's own life shaped the curriculum as much as her professional training did. As an adoptee, and someone who has navigated a complex family system firsthand, she understood early on that psychotherapy which only ever looks at the individual in isolation misses something essential — the relationships, histories and systems that shape who we are. That's why every graduate of our four-year programme leaves ready to work not only with individuals, but with couples, families and groups. It isn't an add-on module. It's built into the spine of the training from Year One.

Why the Structure Is the Way It Is

Having spent years training on another Level 7, four-year programmes before founding her own, Susie already knew what she wanted to do differently. At Psychotherapy Institute:

Each intake progresses through their four years as a single, distinct cohort — there are no multi-year mixed classes. You develop alongside the same group of peers from Year One to graduation.
All training is delivered in-room, in keeping with current guidance from the Partnership of Counselling and Psychotherapy Bodies (PCPB.org.uk).
All trainees are UK-based, and your placement hours — completed through our own in-house Psychotherapy Institute Clinic (P.I.C.) — are also delivered in-room, not remotely.

None of this is incidental. It reflects a considered view of what makes training actually prepare you for real clinical practice.

How We Began

Our System: Psychotherapy Institute Organogram

"Before I trained as a psychotherapist, I spent 15 years in IT software sales for large organisations — IBM, SAS, Computacenter.

I was good at it.

But I wanted to be able to put my head on the pillow at night knowing I'd offered someone real support for the healthy change they wanted to make in their life — not just that I'd closed the next big deal!

When I started my own psychotherapy training in 2007, one requirement gave me real pause: the commitment to be in weekly personal therapy myself, for the full four years.

It was costly, in time and in money, and honestly, it was daunting.

But I knew, underneath that fear, that I had to know myself thoroughly before I could safely sit with someone else's confusion, pain, and history.

I needed to understand clearly where I ended and my client began — what we might share, what was different between us, and how those differences might land between us, sometimes even oppressively, if I wasn't paying attention.

That's part of why I didn't choose to train in Counselling, Clinical Psychology, or Psychiatry — none of those routes carry the same requirement for sustained personal therapy throughout training.

I'm proud to say I've now received more therapy — in length, depth and duration — than I've ever given to a single client. That's not a burden. It's exactly where the confidence and lived experience behind this training comes from — not just the theory and the method, but genuinely knowing what long-term therapeutic work asks of a person, because I've done the work myself."

Susie - Founder & Director