What is Psychological Therapy?
Therapy is a process of self-discovery and healing, which often starts with a person seeking relief from distress. This may be problems they have lived with a long while, or more of an acute concern which has taken centre stage in their life. I take great care to create an environment of compassion, safety and empathy to gently support a person to make sense of their difficulties and work towards desired change. Therapy can take different forms to help someone to reach their individual goals, including working through upsetting issues with the support of a sensitive therapist, facilitating the discovery of meaning and self-identity, creating solutions to specific problems or formulating ways to move towards behavioural change. 

What you can expect from me
We would work together to build a shared understanding of the concerns you have brought to therapy, to help you build on your strengths, improve your sense of agency and build inner resiliency and self-compassion. We would draw on a range of therapeutic approaches as useful to you, to create a space which fosters self-awareness and facilitates change through understanding. Research into therapy also shows that there is great value in understanding a person's past, especially their developmental years, as this will have a bearing on their present-day experience. This does not mean that we only talk about the past or that every therapy needs to be long-term, but this aspect of your experience will be gently drawn upon at a pace that fits for you, to make sense of the difficulties you are facing, understand who you are as a person and to facilitate change in the 'here and now'. 

Therapeutic approaches

I am trained in a number of different approaches and have included a little about the ones I use most frequently for your understanding. Please see my FAQs page for further information on the assessment phase of therapy.

Schema-focused therapy is an integrative approach aimed at helping people improve long-standing problems with thinking, feeling and behaving in self-destructive ways, and has been identified as being widely applicable to a range of psychological concerns with great effect. Schema therapy helps the client to identify and heal early problematic patterns or beliefs which are ingrained and may have led to that person experiencing relationship difficulties, poor self image, difficulties managing intense emotions and getting stuck in unwanted behaviours they are struggling to change. This therapy aims to help someone break these unwanted patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, strengthen self-worth and aid the development of more satisfactory relationships with others and, most importantly, with oneself.

Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is a well-researched therapy which has been designed to help people work on understanding and addressing upsetting thinking processes which can leave people very anxious, low in mood and stuck in cycles of self-defeating behaviours. CBT can help people to learn skills and strategies they can use in their daily lives to manage and resolve specific difficulties. The aim is to empower the client so that they can take these skills away with them and independently apply them within their life for lasting change and improved psychological well-being.

I also have specialist experience in treating people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) using CBT. I tailor sessions so they are more easily accessible to people living with the condition and the aim is to help people to manage how their ADHD impacts on their life, alongside the associated difficulties often reported by people living with this condition, including anxiety, low mood, low self-esteem and relationship problems. 

Eye-Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a more structured approach which uses bilateral stimulation (typically eye movements) to help someone process a traumatic or upsetting memory whilst thinking or talking about the event. It can help reduce the vividness and emotion of a trauma memory and can work well in combination with other approaches.