Everyone has an innate capacity to change, heal and find wellbeing

Counselling is a shorter-term, solution-focused, collaborative therapeutic approach designed to address specific concerns or practical issues affecting day-to-day life. Counsellors use their skills and knowledge of human psychology and behaviour to help you gain clarity and understanding, make difficult decisions, and resolve problems.

As your counsellor, I will listen to you carefully and join you as you contemplate your problem, consider different perspectives, and explore possible solutions. I’ll offer you my objectivity and highlight any blind spots if that’s helpful. And I’ll draw from a range of evidence-based counselling interventions to guide the process while always maintaining a safe and non-judgemental space.

I find clients seek counselling support for life-stage transitions, challenges in relationships, struggles with grief and loss, parenting and family challenges, study and career decisions, and motivation to make change. Sometimes counselling is a short process of up to a few months, and sometimes people decide to further their self-understanding and development in psychotherapy. 

Where counselling explores concerns within awareness, psychotherapy seeks to explore and make sense of both conscious and unconscious aspects of a person’s experience. Psychotherapists use their knowledge of human development, psychology, and neuroscience to help you deepen self-awareness and address long-term problematic patterns and behaviours. 

As your psychotherapist, I will work with you to identify and examine deep-rooted and central beliefs that underlie the problems bringing you to therapy. Often the process starts by looking at your early history and any possible influences like culture, disability, sexuality, and spirituality. We then untangle links between your past and current life. I work from a psychodynamic foundation, and my ongoing personal therapy and supervision are central to my psychotherapeutic abilities.

Clients commonly seek psychotherapy because of ongoing issues associated with anxiety and depression, trauma and abuse, interpersonal issues, sleeping problems, and addictions. Over time, with active participation and increased insight, you can expect to develop greater meaning and purpose, enjoy an enriched emotional landscape, and improved relationships with yourself and others.

Trauma affects how we regulate emotions and often shows up as irritability, fear, or shame. Trauma also impacts our relationships, producing problems with boundaries, intimacy, and trust. All this can lead to feelings of isolation, worthlessness, and hopelessness, and people frequently use avoidance or dissociation to cope. These strategies are often behind issues like substance misuse, disordered eating, and self-harm for which people who have experienced trauma seek professional help.

Wounds from unresolved trauma and abuse have a way of impacting how we function in the world, sometimes without us knowing. For some, trauma’s impact may become apparent over time as symptoms grow and become problematic. For others, trauma wounds can surface suddenly following a change, a shock, or loss.

I specialise in helping people make sense of trauma including abuse and neglect (all types and all degrees) experienced during development or in relationship to others. I take a phase-based approach and reference current understandings of neuroscience to ensure my clients can process their trauma experiences in a very safe, flexible, and understanding environment. 

While re-telling and re-living trauma is not a necessary path to recovery, working through trauma does take time and is emotionally challenging. However, it’s also highly rewarding and an invaluable investment in future physical and psychological wellbeing.

I can help you understand trauma’s impact, appreciate how you’ve survived, and revise previously useful coping strategies to find healthier ways in recovery. If you’ve experienced trauma or abuse and are ready to untangle your experiences, hopefully I can help.