Privacy

The Therapy Stage is a private online counselling and psychotherapy practice run by Claire Hodgson. Claire is responsible for deciding how and why your personal information is used, which UK data protection law calls the “data controller”.

If you send an enquiry through the form on the Contact page, we receive:

• your name
• your email address
• your phone number, only if you choose to give it
• the message you write
• the date and time you sent it

You do not need to share anything about your health or circumstances in a first message. That can wait until we speak.

If the form does not work for you, you can message us on WhatsApp instead. We will then have your WhatsApp number, your name if it shows on your account, and whatever you choose to send. WhatsApp is run by Meta, which handles messages under its own privacy terms.

This website does not use advertising or analytics cookies or trackers. The enquiry form includes a security check provided by Cloudflare, which confirms you are a person rather than an automated program and may look at technical details such as your browser and internet address to do so. Our website host, also Cloudflare, handles similar technical details when it delivers pages to you.

We use what you send us only to read your enquiry and to reply to you, by the email address or phone number you gave. We do not sell your information, and we do not use it for marketing.

Your message passes through the services that carry it to us: our website host (Cloudflare), an automation service that forwards it (n8n) and our email service (Google), before arriving in Claire’s inbox. They handle it only to deliver it.

We keep your enquiry and our replies, including any WhatsApp messages, for 12 months, and then delete them.

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

• ask what information we hold about you, and for a copy of it
• ask us to correct anything that is wrong
• ask us to delete your information
• ask us to limit how we use it, or object to how we use it

If you are unhappy with how your information has been handled, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk. We would always prefer the chance to put things right first.

To ask about your information or use any of these rights, use the enquiry form on the Contact page. Messages are monitored Monday–Friday, 9am–3pm.