Areas of Practice

With over ten years of experience across various NHS settings, I have worked with people presenting with a wide range of psychological difficulties, such as forms of Anxiety, Depression, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and wider forms of psychological trauma, bereavement and loss, anger problems, low self-esteem and persisting self-criticism.

As a Clinical Psychologist, I work to understand how our difficulties can be understood in terms of our life context, and I flexibly apply a range of evidence-based psychological approaches to tailor therapy to you.

I believe in empowering people to know themselves, to learn how to navigate and work with their minds skilfully and flexibly, to move beyond their past, and to move forward into a life shaped by what really matters. Some of the main tools I use are described below.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT)

CBT focuses on the relationships between our beliefs and thinking patterns, emotions and behavioural responses, and how these can form vicious cycles that hold us back, potentially leading to a range of persisting difficulties. CBT works to break cycles such as these, while learning to catch, challenge and grow beyond patterns of difficult thoughts and beliefs about ourselves, others and the world.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

ACT shares many elements with CBT (above), but commonly takes a slightly differing focus. Here, we might also build skills around identifying your deepest values, and how we might live a life defined by these. We would commonly build skills around being present in the moment, when it might be very easy to find our attention yanked away by the chatter of our minds.

We also work to build skills around acceptance, where struggling against ourselves or our emotions might be a source of our suffering. This approach is useful for a wide range of challenges - both specific psychological difficulties and when we face particular storms or challenges in life. It also has many applications in the world of performance and coaching.

Compassion-Focused Therapy

Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) is an approach specifically developed to help experiences of persisting self-criticism and shame. Sometimes, we might know on one level that we are "good enough", but we might struggle with really feeling it and believing it. We might feel the weight of an ever-present inner critic, peppering us with a negative stream of commentary on how we're failing.

With this approach, we learn about how the human mind and emotions work while learning skills to develop a more compassionate mind, one which can support us to thrive, and help to balance and counter self-criticism. Commonly, we look at the roots of how the inner critic might have developed - and seek to nurture and bring compassion to the sources of our pain.

Eye-Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)

EMDR is a family of techniques aimed primarily at targeting traumatic memories and reducing the distress associated with them. This allows us to feel less overwhelmed by distressing memories, often in turn helping us to gain a new perspective on what we have been through, and helping us feel, think and act differently now and in the future.

EMDR is an evidence-based therapy for post-traumatic stress, both in terms of single and multiple-incident trauma. EMDR may be used on its own as part of a targeted approach, or may be used alongside one of the therapies above.