Psychotherapy

When healthy and effective ways of coping don’t seem to be possible, we can find ourselves managing pain in ways that sometimes involve further cost to our health and wellbeing. Sometimes feelings of uncertainty, emptiness, or of being on an emotional rollercoaster, can make it hard to sustain trusting relationships, or to hold onto a sense of who we are and what we want.

Psychoanalytic and cognitive behavioural theory provide a framework for understanding your experiences. While making links between thoughts, feelings and actions, including those which may be outside of your immediate awareness, can be challenging, doing so can also make things feel more bearable.

Psychotherapy is a space where you can speak freely about your external and internal world, in a way which isn’t typically accepted in other settings. By taking the courage to find the words to voice confusing or upsetting experiences, it becomes more possible to think things through, and to make decisions that work for you.

My position

As an intersectional feminist informed about gender, sexual, and relationship diversity, I take an affirmative stance. As a therapist, I’m interested in how various forms of marginalisation and privilege directly impact opportunities and challenges, and also how they may come to be internalised.

I seek to question hierarchical power structures and assumptions which give preference to one identity over another.

When issues of race, social class, gender identity, sexuality, neurodivergence, appearance, etc. arise in therapy, I consider it important to hold the realities of past and present violence and discrimination, acts of resistance, and psychological meaning and processes, in mind.

What happens in therapy?

In order to think about things differently or consider change, we have to feel reasonably safe.

I support the making of safety by being consistently diligent, and by remaining respectful of your experience, and what feels possible on a given day.

At the same time, I will encourage you move towards the edge of your comfort zone, in the direction of goals which we’ve established as important to you.

Who is this therapy suitable for?

It can be more helpful to think about meaning of symptoms than it is to list diagnoses. However, diagnostic categorisation can help to steer our attention towards mechanisms commonly found in particular clusters of symptoms.

For example, the role of unprocessed memory in PTSD; the physiological maintenance of eating disorders; the way in which thoughts and actions become mixed up and feared in OCD; the role of attention in social anxiety; or of identity fragmentation in personality disorders.

Of course, there’s more to it than this, and lots of people don’t fit neatly into one box or another. Being informed about diagnoses, even if holding it lightly, can also inform what is likely to help.

CBT and psychodynamic psychotherapy are recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as a therapy for several mental health problems, including:

• Depression
• Social anxiety
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD)
• Health anxiety
• Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
• Phobias
• Personality Disorder
• Panic
• Other anxiety-based problems

Specialised eating disorder therapy

I also provide specialised therapy for people with disordered eating and eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder.

This typically includes making sense of the problem in context, considering physiological aspects of maintenance cycles, improving nutrition and normalising eating, exploring conflicting feelings about change, finding alternative ways of coping with triggering emotions or interpersonal conflicts, addressing associated anxiety, shame, or depressed mood, and improving feelings of self-worth.

While many of these themes feature in therapy for other problems, a key consideration here is understanding the effects of nutrition and body image.

Find out more

You can find out more about therapy on the FAQ page, or by getting in touch.