My Therapeutic Approach

I specialize in integrative psychotherapy, allowing me to draw from a rich array of therapeutic techniques to tailor the experience to your unique needs. Among the methods I frequently incorporate are:

• Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: Delves into relational patterns and protective mechanisms formed in early life, it also explores how language and dreams can act as messengers from the unconscious.
• Systemic Therapy: Explores how narratives from our families, society, and transgenerational influences shape our inner worlds, setting up storylines that we can become entangled in.
• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: These techniques are particularly useful for providing a safe scaffolding for daily life, helping us change our relationship to fears and obsessive thinking.
• Internal Family Systems: An approach that aids in mapping out and understanding diverse parts of our psyche. It covers 'managers,' who tend to be controlling and bossy, and 'firefighters,' who might use addiction, sex, food, and other means to suppress our feelings.
• Body-focused & Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: For listening to and helping us regulate and integrate what’s going on in the body, with the right and early midbrain sometimes being in direct competition with what the left brain believes is happening!

By blending these modalities, I strive to find the most effective approach for you, ensuring our sessions resonate deeply with your personal journey.

Who I Work With

I see teenagers from 14 upwards, adults, couples, and families in my private practice. I work with clients with a wide range of difficulties including anxiety, emptiness, depression, disconnection, dissociation, problematic self-injury, chemsex and addictions, mood swings, relationship problems, and psychosis. Many of my clients come with a question about life - a feeling of stuckness or deadness, an artist’s block, or lack of purpose. Others come in acute crisis.

I am probably best known for my work with complex trauma and dissociation, presentations where difference and developmental traumas merge, and for success with people who have had multiple unsuccessful treatments elsewhere. I am known to be warm, somewhat irreverent and kind.

Difference and Diversity

My clinic is proudly LGBTQI+ affirmative, kink-positive, and sex work-positive. I enjoy adapting techniques to work with other neurodivergent people and 'spoonies' to discover and work within the unique sensory and pain window of each patient. A lot of my therapy is intercultural, and I use the social GGRRAAACCEEESSS as part of my reflexive praxis. I take thinking about diversities both extremely seriously and with a sense of lightness, having been schooled by thinkers such as Resmaa Menakem and Juno Roche that over-earnestness can be as laborious as disavowal.

Experience

I am a consultant clinical psychologist which means I have been recognised by my colleagues as a leading clinician. I am lucky to have held multiple senior roles in both the NHS, training programmes and academia. I have served as Clinical Lead and Manager for one of the UK’s largest Integrative Psychotherapy Services, built a borough-wide Family Interventions Service, and an Early Intervention in Psychosis Service. Academically, I was Research Lead for Psychology at Barts and the London, and Senior Lecturer in Psychology at City University. Currently, alongside my clinical work, I am Honorary Senior Research Fellow at QMUL and consultant for one of the UK’s leading suicide prevention charities.

I hold a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, and a PgDip in Cognitive Behavioural Psychology. I later trained as a Lacanian Analyst as well as in Systemic Psychotherapy. My earlier background is in philosophy and the arts. I am Practice Editor of the European Journal for Psychotherapy and teach emerging clinicians on five doctoral trainings. I also write regularly for both academic journals and national newspapers.

 I've learned just as much from my interactions with clients as I have from my formal training. I experienced significant emotional distress earlier in life and spent years navigating the psychiatric system. These experiences continually inform my practice, emphasizing the importance of an approach that blends depth work with get-me-through-the-day help.