The families we grow up in shape us in ways we often don’t fully recognise until adulthood, when patterns start to repeat in our current relationships or we find ourselves carrying something we can’t quite name. Perhaps there was emotional unavailability, chronic conflict, addiction, abuse, or a parent whose needs consistently came before yours. Perhaps you were the one who kept the peace, or who was never quite seen, or who stepped into a role that was never yours to carry.

These experiences leave traces. They shape how you relate to others, how safe intimacy feels, how much of yourself you feel entitled to take up. Therapy offers a space to understand those patterns with honesty and without blame, and to develop a different relationship with what you’ve inherited.

Additionally, therapy can help you develop strategies to improve communication, resolve conflicts, and, importantly, establish healthy boundaries to protect yourself from further harm. By working together, we can empower you to navigate these complexities, fostering healthier and more fulfilling relationships, and enhancing your overall well-being.

Grief arrives in many forms, and not all of them are recognised as grief. The death of someone close is the most obvious, but people also grieve relationships that ended badly, parents who were present in body but absent in other ways, versions of themselves they had to abandon early, and futures they had hoped for but won’t now have. Sometimes grief is acute and overwhelming. Sometimes it sits quietly for years and surfaces when least expected.

There is no timetable for grief and no correct way to move through it. What therapy offers is a space where the full weight of a loss can be brought without managing it for someone else’s comfort, and where grief that has become stuck, complicated, or entangled with older losses can be given the attention it needs.

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Trauma is not only what happens in a single overwhelming event. It also develops in the accumulation of experiences that were too much, too soon, or too often, particularly when those experiences happened in childhood, inside the relationships that were supposed to provide safety. Growing up with a parent who was emotionally unavailable, unpredictable, abusive, or struggling with addiction leaves traces that can shape how you relate to others, how safe the world feels, and how much of yourself you allow to be known, sometimes decades later.

This kind of developmental or complex trauma often doesn’t announce itself as trauma. It tends to show up as patterns: difficulty trusting others, a chronic sense of not being quite enough, relationships that follow familiar and painful dynamics, a body that stays on alert even when circumstances are safe.

My work with trauma is relational and psychodynamic, working at a pace your nervous system can tolerate, with attention to what’s happening between us in the room as well as what you bring from your history. I work with the full range of trauma presentations, including complex PTSD, dissociation, and dissociative identity disorder.

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Being neurodivergent, whether autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, late diagnosed, self-diagnosed, or simply wired differently from the people around you, often means navigating a world that wasn’t designed with you in mind. That takes energy. Past experiences, at school, at work, in relationships, may suddenly make more sense under this new lens, which can feel both clarifying and unsettling in equal measure.

Burnout is common in neurodivergent adults, often arriving after years of masking, over-adapting, and performing a version of yourself that doesn’t quite fit. Therapy offers a space to set that down.

In my work with neurodivergent clients, you don’t have to mask, explain, or apologise for how your mind works. I welcome fidget toys, blankets, and staring out of the window. The aim isn’t to change who you are, but to help you live more comfortably as yourself, with greater self-compassion, steadier relationships, and the freedom to understand your differences as part of you rather than as problems to be managed.

Burnout rarely arrives out of nowhere. It tends to build slowly, in the gap between what you’re giving and what you’re getting back, until the capacity to recover between demands has quietly disappeared. You might still be functioning, still meeting your commitments, but something has gone flat. The tiredness doesn’t lift. The things that used to feel meaningful no longer do.

Workplace stress and burnout are often understood as problems of workload or time management. They can be, but they frequently have roots that go deeper, in early patterns of over-functioning, in a difficulty with limits, in the belief that rest has to be earned or that your value is tied to your productivity. When that’s the case, a resilience toolkit won’t reach it.

Psychodynamic therapy offers something different: a space to understand not just what has pushed you to this point, but why, and what it would mean to relate differently to your own needs and limits. I also work with burnout as it presents in neurodivergent adults and those navigating menopause alongside professional demands, where the cumulative load is often significant and frequently invisible to others.

Perimenopause and menopause bring hormonal changes that affect sleep, mood, cognition, and energy in ways that are often more significant than expected and frequently invisible to those around you. Many women describe a growing gap between how they appear on the outside and how depleted or destabilised they feel on the inside, and a sense that they’re managing this largely alone.

The psychological dimensions of this transition are significant and underattended to. Menopause can bring a quiet but disorienting shift in identity, in how you experience your body, your roles, your sense of who you are and who you are becoming. For some women it surfaces grief. For others it brings an urgency to examine what has been put on hold, or a sudden clarity about what is no longer sustainable.

Therapy offers a space to explore what this transition means for you specifically, beyond the symptom management. I bring a particular interest in the psychological and relational dimensions of menopause, including where it intersects with earlier trauma, attachment patterns, or a longstanding difficulty with self-permission and rest.

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Growing up with a parent who was emotionally unavailable, narcissistic, or consistently put their own needs first leaves a particular kind of mark. You may have learned early to make yourself smaller, to monitor the emotional temperature of the room, to earn connection rather than expect it. Perhaps you were the child who kept the peace, or who was never quite seen, or who stepped into a carer role that was never yours to carry.

Sibling dynamics can complicate this further. Being the overlooked child while another was favoured, or carrying responsibility that was unevenly distributed, adds its own layer to what gets internalised about your worth and your place in relationships.

These experiences tend to show up in adult life not as clear memories but as patterns: difficulty trusting that care is genuine, a habit of over-functioning for others, relationships that replay something familiar even when you can see it happening. Understanding where those patterns came from, and what they’ve been protecting you from, is often where the most significant therapeutic work begins.

Therapy offers a space to examine this with honesty and without the pressure to reach a particular conclusion about forgiveness or contact. Whatever your current relationship with your family looks like, the work is about you, and what you’ve been carrying.

Dissociation exists on a spectrum. At the milder end, most people have experienced brief moments of disconnection, arriving somewhere with no memory of the journey, losing track of time, or feeling briefly unreal. These are common and usually unremarkable.

At the more significant end, dissociation can involve a persistent sense that the world or your own self feels unreal, gaps in memory that go beyond ordinary forgetting, difficulty feeling grounded in your own identity, or the experience of distinct internal states that feel separate from one another. This more complex presentation, including Dissociative Identity Disorder, almost always has roots in early or prolonged trauma, and deserves specialist therapeutic attention rather than a general approach.

I work with adults across the full dissociative spectrum, including those with DID and other complex dissociative presentations. My approach is relational and psychodynamic, informed by structural dissociation theory and attachment research. I also offer clinical supervision to therapists working with dissociative clients, including those encountering this presentation for the first time.

If you’re unsure whether what you’re experiencing is dissociation, or whether it’s significant enough to bring to therapy, that uncertainty itself is worth exploring. You don’t need a diagnosis to begin.

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Sexual abuse includes any sexual activity that is unwanted or non-consensual. This includes rape and sexual assault, being touched sexually without permission, coercion or exploitation into sexual activity, and image-based abuse, including intimate images shared without consent or unsolicited explicit content. It can happen at any age, within relationships and families as well as outside them, and it is never the fault of the person it happened to.

The consequences of sexual abuse reach further than the experience itself. Shame is almost universal, often accompanied by a sense that what happened is unspeakable, or that speaking it would not be believed or understood. Many survivors carry their experience alone for years, sometimes decades, before finding a space where it feels safe enough to bring it.

Therapy offers that space. You don’t need to have your experience clearly defined or fully understood to begin. You don’t need to tell everything at once, or at all, until you’re ready. The work moves at your pace, with attention to what your nervous system can tolerate and what feels safe enough to approach. Alongside the trauma itself, therapy can address the shame, the relational patterns, and the effects on your sense of self that sexual abuse so often leaves behind.

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Bullying involves repeated behaviour intended to hurt, humiliate, intimidate, or exclude. It can be physical, verbal, or relational, and it happens in schools, workplaces, families, and online. Whatever form it takes, the impact tends to go beyond the incidents themselves, shaping how you come to see yourself and how safe the world feels.

Childhood bullying in particular can leave lasting traces. Being repeatedly humiliated, excluded, or targeted during formative years affects self-perception, confidence, and the capacity to trust others in ways that can persist long into adulthood. For some people it becomes part of the fabric of how they understand their own worth, without ever quite connecting that understanding back to what happened.

Adult bullying, including in workplaces and relationships, carries its own particular harm, often compounded by the difficulty of being believed or taken seriously, and by the pressure to manage it without complaint.

Therapy offers a space to bring what happened, to examine its effects honestly, and to begin separating what was done to you from the story you may have internalised about yourself as a result. Shame, self-doubt, and the habit of minimising your own experience are all worth bringing into the work.

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Shame is one of the most common and least spoken about experiences people bring to therapy. It’s different from guilt, which is about something you did. Shame is about who you are, a pervasive sense of being fundamentally flawed, too much, not enough, or simply wrong in some way that feels very difficult to name or examine directly.

It develops most often in relational contexts, in families where you were chronically criticised, dismissed, humiliated, or simply not seen clearly. But it can also grow quietly in environments where you learned to read yourself through other people’s eyes and found the reflection consistently unflattering. By adulthood it often operates as an internal voice so familiar it no longer feels like something that happened to you. It just feels like the truth.

Shame thrives in silence and tends to lose some of its power when it can be brought into a relationship where it’s met without judgement. That’s a significant part of what therapy offers, not just the chance to talk about shame, but the experience of being known, including in the parts you’ve most wanted to hide, and finding that the relationship holds.

Anxiety is one of the most common experiences people bring to therapy, and one of the most varied in how it presents. It might show up as persistent worry that doesn’t have a clear object, as panic that arrives without obvious warning, as a vigilance around social situations, or as a more diffuse sense that something is wrong or about to go wrong. It can be exhausting to live with, particularly when it seems to operate independently of what’s actually happening in your life.

From a psychodynamic perspective, anxiety is worth taking seriously as communication rather than simply as a problem to be managed. It often signals something that hasn’t yet found language, an unresolved conflict, an unmet need, or a threat that the nervous system has registered before the conscious mind has caught up. Understanding what the anxiety is responding to, rather than only managing its symptoms, tends to produce more durable change.

I work with anxiety in the context of relational and developmental history, which is often where its roots lie. If you’re also experiencing OCD or a specific phobia, it’s worth discussing this directly, as these presentations sometimes benefit from a different or combined approach alongside relational work.

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• • Betrayal is one of the most disorienting experiences people bring to therapy. Whether it involves an affair, financial deception, a broken confidence, or a discovery that fundamentally changes how you understand a relationship you trusted, the impact tends to go beyond the specific act. What hurts most is usually not the event itself but what it reveals, that the person you relied on was capable of sustained deception, and that your read of the relationship was not what you thought it was.

    That experience can be profoundly destabilising. It raises questions not just about the relationship but about your own judgement, your perceptions, and sometimes about earlier experiences of being deceived or let down. For many people it touches something older than the current betrayal.

    Therapy offers a space to process what has happened without being rushed toward a particular outcome. Whether you’re trying to decide what to do next, working through the aftermath of a relationship that has ended, or trying to understand your own responses, the work is about making sense of what this has meant for you, and what you need in order to move forward on your own terms.

You may have worked hard to build a life that looks solid from the outside, a career that’s moving, relationships that seem steady, perhaps the home and the holidays that signal you’ve arrived. And yet something doesn’t quite fit. There’s a half-formed restlessness, a sense that you haven’t quite located yourself inside the life you’ve constructed, or that the version of you living it isn’t the whole story.

This kind of emptiness is worth taking seriously. It doesn’t always have an obvious cause, which can make it harder to name and easier to dismiss. Sometimes it reflects an accumulation of choices made for the right external reasons but the wrong internal ones. Sometimes it points to parts of yourself that were set aside early, in families or environments where certain aspects of who you were didn’t fit or weren’t welcome.

Therapy offers a space to get curious about what the emptiness might be pointing toward, without rushing to resolve it or replace it with something more comfortable. That kind of careful attention to what’s underneath is often where the most meaningful work begins.

Depression is more than low mood. It can involve a persistent flatness that doesn’t lift, a loss of interest in things that used to matter, difficulty functioning in ordinary ways, and a quality of disconnection from yourself and others that can be hard to describe to people who haven’t experienced it. It may arrive with a clear cause, or it may appear without one, which can make it harder to take seriously or to ask for help with.

Sleep, appetite, concentration, and energy are often affected. Some people describe depression as an absence, a numbness where feeling used to be, rather than as active sadness. Others experience it alongside significant anxiety, anger, or a persistent inner critic that makes daily life feel like an effort that can’t be sustained.

From a psychodynamic perspective, depression often has roots that go deeper than current circumstances. It can be connected to grief that hasn’t been fully processed, to early relational experiences that shaped how you understand your own worth, or to parts of yourself that have been suppressed for so long they’ve stopped making themselves known in any other way. Understanding those roots, rather than only managing symptoms, tends to produce more lasting change.

If you’re having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please reach out to your GP, call the Samaritans on 116 123, or contact a crisis service. Therapy is an important part of recovery from depression, and it works best alongside appropriate clinical support when things are at their most difficult.

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Midlife brings transitions that can be surprisingly disorienting even when they’re expected. Children leaving home, parents ageing or dying, career shifts, your own body changing, relationships evolving or ending, these changes accumulate and can raise questions that feel both urgent and difficult to articulate. Who am I now, outside the roles I’ve been filling? Is this it? What would I choose if I were choosing now?

Sometimes these questions arrive with grief. Sometimes with restlessness, or a sudden clarity about what is no longer sustainable. Sometimes with a sense that the life you’ve built fits well enough on the outside but doesn’t quite feel like yours on the inside.

Midlife transitions often surface earlier material that hasn’t fully been resolved. The questions they raise about identity, purpose, and what you actually want tend to have roots that go back further than the current circumstances. Therapy offers a space to sit with those questions carefully, to understand what this particular moment is asking of you, and to make sense of why it carries the weight it does.

If your internal commentary runs persistently toward not good enough, you’ll mess this up, or everyone else is managing better than you, you’ll recognise how exhausting that voice can be, particularly when outwardly things are going reasonably well. The gap between how you appear to others and how you experience yourself from the inside can feel significant and isolating.

The inner critic rarely develops in a vacuum. It tends to form early, in environments where criticism was more available than encouragement, where conditional approval taught you that your value depended on performance, or where you learned to pre-empt other people’s judgements by getting there first. By adulthood it operates automatically, often so familiar it no longer feels like something that happened to you. It just feels like the truth about you.

Therapy offers a space to examine that voice with curiosity rather than either believing it or fighting it. Understanding where it came from, what it’s been trying to protect you from, and what it’s costing you, tends to loosen its grip more effectively than trying to replace it with positive thinking. Alongside the inner critic, we often find shame, and that too deserves careful attention.

Creative people, writers, artists, and those who experience the world with particular intensity and depth, often bring a specific kind of difficulty to therapy. Overwhelm, self-doubt, perfectionism, creative blocks, and the gap between the work you can imagine and the work you can produce, are common. So is the sense that your sensitivity, which gives you access to so much, also makes ordinary life harder to navigate than it seems to be for others.

These aren’t flaws to be corrected. They tend to be deeply connected to the same qualities that make creative work possible, and the aim of therapy isn’t to smooth them away but to help you understand them well enough to work with rather than against them.

I have a particular interest in working with writers and creatives, and I bring therapeutic writing into this work when it’s a useful addition. Writing can be a way of accessing what talking alone doesn’t always reach, and for people who already have a relationship with language or image-making, it can be a natural extension of the therapeutic process.

Therapy with creatives often involves attending carefully to the inner critic, to shame around the work, to the relational patterns that can make collaboration or visibility feel threatening, and to whatever it is that sits between you and the creative life you’re trying to live.