My approach
You know something’s wrong. You might even know what it is. You may be thoughtful, informed and self-aware, but finding that certain patterns seem to repeat themselves no matter what you do.
In our sessions, I draw on a range of approaches to help move beyond surface level insight into these patterns into what’s keeping you stuck and towards making meaningful change in your life.
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My clients tend to be thoughtful, self-aware people with a creeping sense of languishing and lost potential that is showing up in the way they’re experiencing themselves, the world and their close relationships, despite working hard on themselves.
If this is you, then it might not feel dramatic enough to be a crisis, but you might find that what’s left is a sense of emptiness and disappointment with life which doesn’t seem to go away.
It might feel like the meaning and purpose you thought you’d have found by now still hasn’t arrived. Instead you find yourself going through the motions, stuck in unfulfilling roles and relationships while somehow still feeling disconnected from yourself and different from others in a way that feels harder to ignore. Something feels missing.
But what happens now? Is this really all there is? These are the kinds of questions that bring people into therapy with me.
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Working with me means we won’t shy away from how daily life can bring us back to the bigger questions we’re afraid to think about. We will go at a pace that feels safe and manageable to work with these questions by exploring the deeper personal and social frameworks through which you are making sense of your struggles, and think about how to choose a different path when these frameworks feel like they are working against you and self-awareness alone hasn’t gotten you there.
I draw from a range of therapeutic approaches but mostly existential and relational psychodynamic frameworks, as well as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for when more structured guidance could be helpful.
This means we’ll pay attention to the patterns shaping how you experience yourself and the people around you, where those patterns came from, and how to move beyond just awareness and towards a different kind of life.
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I fully acknowledge the role that culture and systemic factors play in our mental health, and see in my practice how the messages we receive through these mediums can impact us deeply - sometimes transmitted through generations. But I don’t bring these ideas into the room uncritically or with my own agenda either. Together we explore your story at your pace and on your terms.
My therapy philosophy
Life leaves marks.
Difficult relationships, painful experiences, and the weight of a past we have worked hard to move beyond can shape the way we see ourselves and the way we move through the world in ways that aren’t always easy to unpick. The circumstances we never fully chose can leave residue that doesn’t just disappear because we’ve worked hard, moved on, or built a different life. Part of what that residue consists of is the ways we had to adapt in order to survive, belong, or stay connected to the people who mattered to us. We learn early what makes us acceptable, what earns us love, and what we need to hide or suppress in order to keep our place. These lessons shape not just how we behave, but who we understand ourselves to be. Therapy, as I practise it, starts from that reality rather than trying to get past it. The goal is real, felt change; but the route there runs through understanding and accepting what is actually there, not around it.
The ways we adapt are rarely arbitrary. They are often understandable responses to real pressures: the need to feel safe, to be loved, to maintain connection with the people who matter to us. I notice that the people I work with tend to be highly capable, self-sufficient, accommodating, and responsible - all things that might have helped feel secure or valued at one point or another. Achieving, pleasing others, or staying in control are common ways I see that people helped navigate environments that feel uncertain or demanding. I think these adaptations are, in a deeper sense, ways of managing more fundamental fears. Fears about whether we are genuinely acceptable to others. Whether we can bear to be alone with ourselves. Whether our lives have real meaning, or whether the choices we have made are truly our own.
I’m interested in what we do when the life we have built no longer fits.
There often comes a point where the strategies that once helped us begin to feel like constraints. The life we have constructed around them may look stable or even successful from the outside. But something has shifted. The person we have learned to be no longer feels like the whole of who we are. People I work with describe this as a sort of languishing or lack of vitality, or a persistent sense of disconnection despite being around others. A feeling that you are going through the motions of a life that made sense once upon a time, but that no longer feels fully yours. You might find yourself achieving what you once wanted but feeling strangely empty. You might be the person others depend on, while privately feeling exhausted or unseen. You might understand your patterns clearly and still find yourself unable to change them.
I think of these struggles as an invitation to ask different questions of ourselves. Not just how do I cope better, but who have I learned I need to be, and at what cost? What have I built my life around, and does it still reflect what genuinely matters to me? What parts of myself have had no space?
Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis is a key inspiration in my practice here. He describes this kind of experience as a summons from the deeper self: a pressure that builds when the life we have constructed around others' expectations, or around our own defences, is no longer large enough to contain who we actually are. The discomfort is real, but so is what it is pointing towards. This is something I believe is important to explore together as a starting point for understanding and eventually change.
We come to therapy to change - but this might look different to how we think it will.
I believe therapy involves more than identifying problems or learning strategies. Understanding yourself is important, but lasting change usually involves something more than insight alone. We live in a time when psychological information is everywhere. Many people come to therapy already knowing a great deal about themselves. They can name their patterns, trace them to earlier experiences, and articulate what they are struggling with. Yet they still find themselves responding in the same ways, unsure why understanding has not been enough and sometimes convinced that therapy is not for them.
Our difficulties live beyond this understanding. They are ultimately things we feel - emotional truths that we carry deep inside us, and re-enact in our relationships. Knowing something is not the same as experiencing it differently - something many will attest to. I believe therapy offers a space to slow down and become curious about what is happening beneath the surface. Together, we can explore feelings that have been difficult to access, needs that have been pushed aside, and parts of yourself that have had little room to breathe. Over time, this can shift your relationship with yourself. Difficult emotions can become things to understand rather than things to avoid. Patterns can become something to reflect on with curiosity rather than something to judge yourself for.
I think building a life that feels yours starts with being truly seen and accepted.
Therapy is a relationship in which something can actually change. This can be confusing to grasp at first because many of us carry deep, often unspoken fears about what happens when we are truly known by another person. We might expect to be judged, found wanting, or rejected - often based on experience from the past. As a result, we might have learned to manage these fears by presenting only the parts of ourselves that feel acceptable, by being useful, by not asking for too much from others.
These patterns tend to emerge in therapy too. You might feel pressure to have the right answers, worry about taking up too much space, or find it difficult to say what you actually need. These moments are not problems to be overcome. They are some of the most important material we can work with, because they offer a live opportunity to experience something different: to bring a more complete version of yourself into contact with another person, and to find that it is bearable, even possible.
From my work with people from all walks of life over the years, I’ve seen this is where real change tends to happen. Not only through understanding where our patterns come from, but through the experience of being in a relationship where the usual terms no longer apply. Where the parts of ourselves we have kept hidden can gradually come into the open and we can develop a different relationship with another person as well as with ourselves and with the deeper questions our lives are asking of us.
If this way of seeing things resonates with you, contact me to discuss starting therapy either online or in-person in Clerkenwell, Islington today.
Frequently asked questions about my approach
What types of therapy do you offer?
I use a broadly relational approach, drawing especially from relational psychodynamic therapy, humanistic approaches and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). We’ll pay special attention to relational patterns shaping how you experience yourself and others and explore where they came from and what they are costing you. An existential approach means we also think about questions of meaning, identity, and freedom that tend to surface around difficult experiences. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers practical tools for developing a different relationship with difficult thoughts and feelings, grounded in your own values. All three work together rather than separately.
What’s it like to be in the room with you as my therapist?
You will find it most useful to work with me if you want someone who will be genuinely on your side while also being willing to challenge you. Someone who thinks carefully about what lies underneath your experience rather than simply reflecting it back.
This is not a space where you will be guided toward conclusions already reached but also not one where you will find me sitting back passively. Expect a warm but down-to-earth presence working alongside you, where difficult experiences can be explored in a way that opens toward something that feels genuinely yours.
What if you get it wrong and I feel like you don’t get me?
I probably will get it wrong sometimes, and you’re probably tired of people getting it wrong. The beauty of drawing from relational approaches to therapy is that part of the process is about exploring how it feels when someone does gets it wrong and doesn’t get you, and there are many ways for us to work with this. This isn’t always easy though and can in fact feel like one of the hardest parts of therapy. But know that this is something we use in the room to help create a space that feels safe and like it’s working for you, so you can move towards the changes you want to see in your life.
Why is the relationship between therapist and client so important in this work?
“It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.”
D.W. Winnicott
Much of what brings people to therapy is a long history of not quite being found, of hiding the most real parts of themselves because the environment could not be trusted to receive them. I don’t believe change happens primarily through insight or technique; if that was the case then all the self-improvement books and podcasts would be all that you needed to change and heal. The most meaningful change happens through the experience of being genuinely known by another person, perhaps for the first time. This is why the therapeutic relationship is where the work actually happens.
But what if I do need a more practical approach alongside the deeper work?
You might experience symptoms of trauma, panic, anxiety, OCD or depression that need practical attention alongside the longer term work. Where this is the case, I draw on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to help develop a different relationship with difficult thoughts, feelings, and urges. Rather than trying to eliminate or suppress these experiences, ACT works by changing how you relate to them, loosening their grip through acceptance and defusion rather than avoidance or control. Suitability for this kind of combined approach is something we would discuss at the consultation stage.
What if I have had therapy before and it did not help?
This is one of the most common things people say when they get in touch. Previous therapy not helping, or feeling insufficient, does not mean therapy can’t help you. It often means the approach or relationship was not well matched to what you were actually carrying. People who have felt frustrated by previous therapy, who felt it stayed too surface-level, was too passive pr active, moved too quickly, or did not reach what was actually going on, often find that longer term relational work offers something meaningfully different.
What if I find it hard to open up?
This is more common than people realise and is not a barrier to the work. Words can feel hard to reach or or exposing, and difficulty opening up is often directly connected to the kinds of experiences that have brought you to therapy in the first place.
Where this is the case, we can use creative and expressive approaches alongside talking, including image and drawing, as a way to bring what you want to express into the room or help you feel safe or calm. There is no expectation that you will arrive and say everything immediately and the pace is always yours to set.
Why does understanding the past matter if I am living in the present?
The past does not stay in the past. It lives in the patterns of how you relate to yourself and others, in the emotions that feel forbidden, and in the expectations you carry into every new relationship or experience. These patterns were usually formed for good reasons but over time they can start to shape the present in ways that feel more like fate than choice. Understanding where they came from does not mean being trapped by history. It means developing a new relationship with it so that it stops running the show invisibly.
What does it mean to work with meaning and identity rather than symptoms?
Symptoms are often the surface of something deeper. Feelings of emptiness, meaninglessness, languishing, and being different from others are usually signals from a self that has outgrown the life it is living. James Hollis writes about the provisional life; the identity we all build in response to others' expectations and early relational necessity, and how it eventually reaches a point of collapse. That collapse is often the first genuine invitation to find out who you actually are. Working with meaning and identity means taking that invitation seriously rather than treating it as a problem to be managed away from consciousness.