Psychologist
Psychotherapy, Psychological assessments
PsychD Professional Doctorate in Psychotherapeutic & Counselling Psychology, University of Surrey
MSc Psychology (distinction), University of East London
Certificate in Counselling Skills, Gestalt Centre London
MSc Computer Science, University of Bristol
BA (Hons) Drama, University of Manchester
My clinical experience is largely in NHS Secondary Care Mental Health and psychotherapy teams, treating a wide-range of mental health difficulties. I have worked in dedicated Cancer Psychology services, including as the majority caseload holder for a small Cancer Psychology service serving an entire hospital and London borough. I am also experienced in working with a wide range of diversity issues, and bringing these into the therapy, including, but not limited to gender, sexuality, race, age, physical health, and religious faith.
As a counselling psychologist, I am able to work with diagnoses, but my approach is always based on psychological formulation: a unique and comprehensive understanding of the psychological difficulties of the individual, understood in terms of a wide range of psychological and psychotherapeutic theories and models. Unlike clinical psychology, counselling psychology is specifically focussed on training skilled talking therapists, across a diverse range of approaches.
Like most counselling psychologists, I work in a very relational way, often helping my clients make sense of themselves and their difficulties through understanding early experiences, current relationships and their therapeutic relationship with me, and how patterns in one area can often offer understandings about another. I draw on a range of therapeutic models and modalities, including psychodynamic, person-centred, existential, cognitive and behavioural, transactional analysis, and attachment theory. Which I use depends entirely on my client and what they bring, and often emerges over the course of the work, as we work together to make sense of the problems and determine how we might work to resolve them. My starting point is always the client, and I believe strongly that the therapy should fit the client, not the other way around.
I have a particular passion for Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) and often find the CAT model, of understanding how we all learn a limited set of ways of understanding ourself and others, through relationships, can help make sense of why we often end up stuck in patterns of experiences that seem to form vicious circles. By recognising these patterns and how they keep us stuck, it is possible to build alternatives and break free from the cycle.
Above all, when seeing my for therapy, you can expect a compassionate, accepting and non-judgemental relationship, where you are able to speak freely, safe in the knowledge that my only goals are to understand you and your world, to help add to that understanding and together to find a way through the difficulties you face. There is nothing you can’t say to me and no area that can’t be explored: if it’s important to you, then it’s important to me. And every therapy is a collaboration: as is often said in psychotherapy circles, the therapist is the expert on therapy, but the client is the expert on themselves.
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