Areas I Work With
People come to therapy for many different reasons and you don't need to arrive with a clear label or a neat explanation of what's wrong. Below are some of the areas I commonly work with. Further down the page you'll also find more on some areas where I have a special interest: trauma and its effects, boarding school experience, and ADHD.
If something is on your mind that isn't listed here, please do get in touch.
Work & Career Pressure
The demands of professional life, the weight of responsibility, the pressure to perform and keep delivering. Sometimes it's burnout. Sometimes it's a growing sense that the path you're on no longer fits. Either way, it deserves more than just pushing through.
Anxiety & Stress
Anxiety can show up in many different ways: racing thoughts, a tight chest, a constant low-level unease, or a sense of being on edge without quite knowing why. Together we can look at what's driving it, not just manage the symptoms.
Burnout & Exhaustion
When pushing through has been the default for so long that there's nothing left. Burnout isn't just tiredness: it's often a signal that something in how you've been living needs attention, not just rest.
Self-Worth & Confidence
The quiet but persistent sense of not being quite enough, of waiting to be found out, or of succeeding despite yourself rather than because of yourself. These feelings are more common than most people admit, and they're worth understanding properly.
Relationships
Strain or distance with a partner, family member, or colleague. Or the recognition that the same dynamic keeps appearing in different relationships, despite genuine efforts to change it. Patterns in relationships often have roots that go deeper than the relationship itself.
Life Transitions
Stepping into a new role, stepping back from one, rethinking direction, or navigating a change you didn't choose. Transitions often stir up more than the practical question of what to do next: they can raise deeper questions about identity, purpose, and what you actually want.
Anger & Frustration
Feelings that are hard to express, hard to make sense of, or that feel disproportionate to what triggered them. Anger is often a signal rather than a problem in itself, and understanding what's underneath it can make a real difference.
Success Without Satisfaction
Achieving what you set out to achieve, and finding it hasn't brought the peace or meaning you expected. A surprisingly common experience, and one that can be genuinely disorienting when the thing you worked toward doesn't feel the way you thought it would.
Identity & Self-Understanding
A growing sense of not knowing who you are underneath the roles you play and the expectations you meet. Or a feeling that the version of yourself you present to the world doesn't quite match who you actually are.
Grief & Loss
Grief doesn't always follow a clear path, and it isn't only about bereavement. The loss of a relationship, a role, an identity, or a version of your future can be just as disorienting. Sometimes it just needs space and time to be understood properly.
There are also some areas where I have a special interest...
Trauma and its effects
Trauma isn't always what people think it is. It doesn't have to be a single event, or even one that others would recognise as significant. What makes something traumatic is how it was experienced by you, not how it might appear to others. This is important because many people quietly dismiss what they went through, often because others react to it as though it was nothing. There are countless reasons why they might do this and none of them are about you being wrong.
The effects of trauma often seem to have nothing to do with what actually happened, but they live on in our lives and keep showing up, often at the most unexpected and inconvenient times: persistent anxiety, difficulty trusting yourself or others, shame about what you went through or about how you've coped since. Many people feel there must be something wrong with them for still being affected. There isn't. It is a normal response to an abnormal experience.
Trauma is our nervous system being overwhelmed by one or more events that we perceive as threatening. It leaves an imprint: a way of responding to the present as though the past is still happening. This is why people often feel anxious or fearful in situations, even when a rational part of them knows that they are safe. When something in the present reminds the nervous system of what happened, whether that's a situation, a person, a tone of voice, or even just a feeling, the response can be immediate and powerful. The body reacts as though the original experience is happening again, right now. It isn't possible, in that moment, to simply reason it away, and this can be quite frightening to experience. This is why trauma can disrupt so many areas of life including relationships.
This can also shape how we feel about ourselves. Many people carry a sense of shame: not just about what happened, but about how they have responded to it since. Some feel they should be over it by now, or wonder why they can't just move on. Some feel, at some level, that they were to blame, or that what happened was somehow deserved. None of that is true.
Working with trauma doesn't have to mean revisiting difficult memories in detail. The approach I take is gradual and body-based: building a sense of steadiness first, and from there approaching difficult material carefully and at your pace. Over time, the nervous system learns that it can encounter difficult territory without being overwhelmed by it. Memories don't disappear, but their grip can loosen. This draws on my specific training in somatic approaches to trauma alongside a personal understanding of how the past shapes the present. This is also work I continue to develop, expanding the tools I can draw on.
Boarding school and its lasting impact
Being sent away young leaves marks that aren't always easy to see at first. The self-sufficiency, the keeping going, the difficulty with vulnerability: these make sense as adaptations. The problem is they tend to follow people into adult life long after the original need for them has passed.
This is also work I do with partners and spouses trying to understand what someone who went to boarding school may be carrying, and why certain dynamics in the relationship feel so hard to shift.
The patterns that boarding school tends to create are fairly consistent, even if people don't always recognise them as connected to that experience. Learning early to manage without emotional support, to adapt to what's expected rather than what's true, to not show weakness or need too much: these become deeply ingrained ways of operating.
In adult life, this can show up as a difficulty letting people in, even when you want to. A tendency to keep going and hold things together that eventually becomes exhausting. A quiet uncertainty about who you actually are beneath the coping, or what you actually want rather than what's expected. Relationships that feel strained in ways that are hard to explain.
Some people connect these patterns to boarding school quite quickly. Others don't make the link until much later, often when something in adult life, a relationship under strain, a transition, a moment of burnout, brings things to the surface.
This is territory I understand from the inside. I won't need it explained and I won't minimise it because it looks like privilege from the outside.
ADHD and late diagnosis
Discovering you have ADHD later in life can bring real relief. It can also bring questions, grief, and a need to re-read your own history in a different light. The emotional journey after diagnosis is rarely straightforward, and it deserves proper attention.
Many people spend years quietly wondering why certain things feel so much harder for them than they seem to for everyone else. The diagnosis explains a lot. But it can also open up a complicated mix of feelings: relief that there's a reason, anger at what was missed, grief for the years spent struggling unnecessarily, and sometimes a deep uncertainty about who you are now that the old story no longer fits.
The self-doubt that builds up over years of compensating and masking can be significant, and it doesn't automatically lift when you have a diagnosis. Therapy can be a place to make sense of that history without judgement: to understand what was always neurodivergence and what you've come to believe about yourself as a result of it. To find ways of working with how you actually are rather than against it.
This isn't only about processing the diagnosis. It's about rebuilding trust in yourself, and finding a version of your story that feels more accurate and more liveable.
If any of this resonates, you might also want to read more about how I work or a bit more about me. Practical questions about cost and logistics are covered on the fees and FAQs pages.
Something resonating?
You don't need to have it all figured out to get in touch. Let's talk.
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