About Me

I work with adults whose lives look sorted from the outside, education, career, home, caring responsibilities, a busy diary, but who privately feel as though they don’t quite cope as well as they appear to. You might feel anxious, overwhelmed, or too much, or as if you’re always one step away from everything unravelling. Many people I see have a sense of not living the life they had imagined, without being sure how that happened or what to do about it.

Many of my clients come from complex or difficult family backgrounds, including emotionally unavailable or narcissistic parents, or have lived through sexual, relational, or developmental trauma. You may have learned to appear capable while feeling insecure, unseen, or not quite real to yourself. Perhaps you sometimes disconnect or switch off, lose track of what you feel, or find your reactions don’t make sense, even to you.

Therapy with me offers a calm, steady space to make sense of all of this. It’s an hour a week that belongs to you, with no need to perform or manage how you come across. Time to think, feel, and slowly explore how your history continues to shape your relationships, choices, and sense of self. You don’t have to arrive with a clear story or neat explanation. We can start from: something isn’t right and I don’t know what to do about it.

How I Work

I am a psychodynamic psychotherapist, which means I’m interested in the patterns that run through your life, how earlier relationships and the survival strategies you developed around them continue to influence how you see yourself and others. Together we attend to both your present life and the longer story behind it. I don’t expect you to tell everything at once, particularly if you’ve experienced trauma or loss. We work at a pace that feels manageable, staying curious about the parts of you that may feel confusing, shameful, or difficult to access. The therapeutic relationship itself is central to the process, because many of the difficulties people bring have their roots in relationships, and tend to shift inside them too.

I have a specialist interest in dissociation and work with adults across the full dissociative spectrum, including complex dissociative presentations and Dissociative Identity Disorder. I hold the SCID-D qualification, the most comprehensive and reliable clinical instrument for assessing dissociation, and I bring specialist training from the Pottergate Centre, ESTD, and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust alongside my core psychodynamic training.

For some people, therapeutic and reflective writing can be a useful addition to talking therapy, for example letters you never send, fragments of memory, or short pieces that capture something you can’t yet say out loud. Writing is always optional and never required. It’s simply another way of helping you find your own words and story, and it’s an area I have trained in extensively and written about academically.

I work primarily with adults who are functioning in daily life and able to commit to regular, longer-term therapy, including those with histories of trauma, dissociation, or difficult relational experience who are not in immediate crisis. I also offer Single Session Therapy for those who need a more focused one-off conversation.

I offer clinical supervision to qualified therapists and trainees, with a particular interest in supporting supervisees working with trauma and dissociation.

Professional Background

I am a Senior Accredited Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), the highest individual accreditation the organisation offers. My training has always focused on the impact of early relationships, trauma, and attachment on adult life.

I am currently undertaking a Professional Doctorate in Psychotherapy and Psychological Trauma at the University of Chester, a four to five year programme that deepens my clinical practice and keeps me engaged with current research in the trauma and dissociation field. My doctoral work builds on my MA dissertation, which explored the use of therapeutic writing with adult survivors of trauma.

I am a member of the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation (ESTD), the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), and Lapidus International, the national body for writing and wellbeing.

Professional Registration & Memberships

• Senior Accredited qualified Member of British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) Registration number 378204.
• Member of the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation (ESTD).
• Member of Lapidus, the national organisation devoted to the promotion of writing and creativity for personal development.

Qualifications

Academic

• PGDip Psychodynamic Psychotherapeutic Counselling.
• MA Psychoanalytic Studies.
• BA (Hons) Therapeutic Psychology & Counselling.

Professional Certificates

• Trauma and Dissociation Blended Learning Course 2022/23 – European Society for Trauma and Dissociation.
• Complex Trauma Certification Training Level 1 and Level 2 with Janina Fisher.
• Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust Certificate in Theory and Treatment of Trauma.
• Understanding and Working with Complex Traumatic Dissociation – European Society for Trauma and Dissociation.
• Certificate in Supporting Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse – NAPAC.
• Foundation in Group Analysis.
• Certificate in Couple Relationships – Tavistock Relationships.
• Certificate in Counselling and Psychotherapy.
• Post qualifying Certificate Online and telephone Counselling.
• Certificate in Coaching.
• Certificate in Clinical Assessment Skills – WPF.

Additional CPD Training

Trauma

• Healing the traumatised mind, brain and body with Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk.
• Healing traumatic stress: helping mind, brain and body with Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk.
• 2nd Annual PTSD International Conference – Nscience.
• 2020 Trauma Conference – Black Asian and Minority Ethnic Voices talk mental health.
• Trauma, Dissociation & Recovery – PODS (for Dissociative Survivors).
• PTSD and Working with dissociative disorders – PODS.
• Attachment and Traumatic Bonding – Christiane Sanderson
• Managing Power, Control, Boundary and Attachment Dynamics when working with Survivors of Abuse – Christiane Sanderson
• Living in a Fog: Complex Trauma, PTSD and Dissociation – Christiane Sanderson
• Sex & Sexuality in the Therapeutic Space – Christiane Sanderson
• Courage in Trauma therapy.
• Demystifying Trauma & Dissociation.
• Religious trauma and spiritual abuse  – Michelle F. Moseley
• SCID-D Training – an interview tool for evaluating dissociative symptoms in adults and adolescents. It is considered the most comprehensive and reliable instrument for assessing dissociation in clinical settings – Pottergate Centre.
• Reflective practice for people who work with non-recent childhood abuse survivors – Tavistock.
• Discovering the role of the Traumatic Attachment in the treatment of Trauma related disorders

General CPD

• Managing Power, Control, Boundary and Attachment Dynamics with Survivors of Abuse.
• Sex and Relationship Diversity in the Therapy Room – Dr Meg-John Barker.
• Preoccupied Attachment – Fear of Abandonment.
• Fundamentalist religious childhoods and adult health – Implications for practice – Dr Gill Harvey.
• Working with suicide.
• Therapeutic conversations to change lives – Dr Margot Sunderland./li>

Groups

• Working with and facilitating groups (CPD36) – Tavistock.
• Facilitating Support groups.
• Working with online therapy groups.

Writing

• Facilitating Writing for Wellbeing.
• Therapeutic Writing Workshop.
• Therapeutic and Reflective writing training.
• Facilitation and workshop development training – International Wellbeing-through-writing Institute.
• Expressive Writing Intervention: Helping to facilitate a client’s processing of trauma/distress.
• Poetry Therapy workshop – Charmaine Pollard

Supervision

• Certificate in Psychodynamic Supervision.
• Postgraduate Certificate in Clinical Supervision.

Bereavement

• Bereavement counselling – Accredited Foundation Course.
• Approaching Bereavement counselling in a hospice setting.
• Working with end of Life narratives.

Outside my clinical work, I have a background in business before retraining in psychotherapy, and experience across domestic violence support, services for women and girls, and hospice counselling. I write, both for professional purposes and for myself, and I walk with my Labrador, which remains one of the most reliable ways I know to think clearly.