The process

When you arrive, you’ll find a therapeutic space that aims to feel calm, nurturing, and genuinely open. Every part of you is welcome - whether you’re sitting with loneliness, fear, sadness, confusion, uncertainty, rage and/or frustration. The first few sessions will be about gaining a better understanding of what’s been happening lately, the context of your life, and your history. Sometimes even just talking through this part can feel enormously relieving. We’ll take our time to build a relationship that feels steady and reliable. And from this foundation, we can begin to explore your feelings and thoughts, relational patterns, and processing lived experiences, so that you may start to have a better understanding of yourself, and experience a more comfortable inner world.

Supporting a deeper, kinder relationship with yourself sits at the heart of my work. This process often connects to how you experience closeness with others, your sense of self, and the ways you’ve learned to adapt, attach, and protect yourself over time. My approach is mainly psychodynamic, with an integration of other approaches when helpful such as humanistic approaches, nervous-system regulation and psychoeducation.

What is Integrative Psychotherapy?

Integrative Psychotherapy is an approach that allows the therapist to draw from a range of therapeutic models, weaving them together in a way that is responsive to the needs of each individual client. It recognises that people are complex, and that no single therapeutic model can meet every need. Central to this way of working is the belief that meaningful change emerges through a strong, collaborative therapeutic relationship.

As a double meaning, integration also refers to bringing together the different parts of yourself. This may involve meeting aspects of you that have been hidden, silenced, or rejected, and discovering qualities or strengths you may not have recognised before. It’s about deepening your understanding of who you are - your fears, longings, values, and desires - and making space for the full range of your emotional world, including those feelings that may once have felt too much, unacceptable, or unsafe.

What is Psychodynamic Psychotherapy?

Psychodynamic psychotherapy originally developed out of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, a form of treatment aiming to work deeply with the unconscious as a way of understanding thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and to alleviate mental suffering by allowing repressed desires, fears and conflicts come to the surface. Psychodynamic psychotherapy has many of its theoretical routes in psychoanalysis, but is practiced slightly differently and more flexibly.

Working with me typically involves meeting once a week at the same time, although frequency may be adjusted depending on needs. Everything mentioned above may be part of our exploration, and your early experiences will be part of understanding this. The relationship that develops between us can also often be used to understand and experience relational difficulties in real time. For example, if you frequently feel a certain feeling with others, you are likely to experience the same in the therapeutic relationship at times, however in this space we can name it, try to understand it’s origins, and work with it, to create meaningful, lasting change.

This is, of course, only a brief, generalised description, and it will vary person to person depending on needs and wants. If you have any questions or would like to hear more you are very welcome to reach out and request an introductory call.

About me

I am a qualified Integrative Psychotherapist, trained in the UK. I have a BSc in Psychology, and I’ve previously worked within the adolescent mental health sector. Alongside this, I have volunteered with a number of organisations including BEAT, The Kids Network, Resources for Autism, and The Psychosynthesis Trust, a low-cost therapy organisation.

Something that is important to me is grounding my work in a trauma-informed, anti-pathologising way. This means I do not view behaviours or emotional responses as signs of something ‘wrong’ or ‘disordered’ within you. Instead, we understand them as meaningful responses to difficult life experiences. Rather than asking, ‘What’s wrong with me?’, we gently move towards the question, ‘What’s happening inside me?’. Compassion, curiosity, and care are central to the way I work.

I regularly engage in extra training to make sure I am developing my practice and staying up to date with relevant and new information in the mental health field. To find out more about this please ask.