You don’t have to know exactly what’s wrong to know that something needs to change

People come to therapy for many different reasons.

Sometimes something has happened — a loss, a relationship difficulty, a traumatic experience, becoming a parent or a major change in life.

At other times there is no single event.

You may simply have reached a point where the way you have always coped isn’t working anymore.

You might find yourself thinking:

“Why do I keep doing this?”
“Why can’t I switch off?”
“Why am I always the one holding everything together?”
“Why do I react so strongly to certain things?”
“Why do I find it so difficult to ask for what I need?”
“Why do I understand myself so well, yet still can’t seem to change?”

These are often good places for us to begin.

Anxiety, overwhelm and overthinking

Perhaps your mind rarely feels quiet.

You anticipate what might go wrong, replay conversations, question decisions or feel responsible for making sure everything is OK.

Sometimes anxiety is obvious. At other times it hides behind being organised, prepared, productive or constantly busy.

You may appear perfectly capable to everyone around you while your mind and body are working overtime underneath.

I help you explore what your anxiety may be responding to, recognise the patterns that keep it going and develop a greater capacity to feel safe without needing to control everything around you.

People-pleasing, perfectionism and always being the strong one

You may be very good at noticing what everybody else needs.

Saying no can feel uncomfortable. Asking for help may be even harder.

Perhaps you set very high standards for yourself, feel guilty when you rest or worry about disappointing people. You may give far more than you receive and then feel exhausted, resentful or invisible.

These patterns rarely appear from nowhere.

Together, we can begin to understand what you learnt about love, approval, belonging and your own worth — and help you develop ways of relating to yourself and others that don’t require you to continually abandon yourself.

Self-worth and never feeling quite enough

You may have achieved a great deal and still carry a quiet feeling that somehow you are not enough.

Perhaps criticism stays with you far longer than praise. You compare yourself with others, doubt your decisions or feel that you constantly need to prove your worth.

Sometimes this shows itself as perfectionism. Sometimes as imposter syndrome. Sometimes as staying small, avoiding opportunities or choosing relationships in which your own needs disappear.

Therapy can help us look beneath the judgement and begin to understand the beliefs and experiences that shaped the way you see yourself.

The aim isn’t to convince yourself that you’re good enough.

It is to reach a place where your worth no longer has to be continually earned.

Relationships and attachment

Relationships have an extraordinary ability to touch the parts of us that we thought we had dealt with.

You may become anxious when someone pulls away, withdraw when somebody gets too close, struggle to trust, fear abandonment or repeatedly find yourself taking responsibility for the emotional wellbeing of the relationship.

You may know that your reaction seems bigger than the situation in front of you — but still find yourself unable to stop it.

Rather than asking only “What’s wrong with this relationship?”, our work can also explore:

“What happens inside me when I am in relationship with another person?”

Understanding your attachment patterns can help you recognise when the past is influencing the present and begin creating relationships in which there is greater choice, honesty and emotional safety.

Childhood experiences and family wounds

You don’t need to have had a terrible childhood for childhood to have affected you.

Sometimes the wounds are much quieter.

Perhaps you learnt to be good, helpful, independent or successful. Perhaps there wasn’t much room for difficult emotions. You may have become the peacemaker, the responsible one, the invisible one or the person who didn’t need very much.

Those adaptations may have helped you enormously.

But what protects a child can sometimes restrict the adult they become.

Therapy gives us an opportunity to understand those early patterns without blaming the past or remaining trapped within it.

The question gradually becomes less:

“Why did this happen to me?”

and more:

“What do I want to choose now?”

Trauma and experiences that still feel present

Trauma isn’t defined only by what happened.

It can also be about what your mind and body had to do in order to get through what happened.

You may experience intrusive memories, anxiety, emotional numbness, hypervigilance, difficulty trusting, physical tension or reactions that seem disproportionate to what is happening now.

Sometimes there may be no clear memory at all — simply a feeling that certain situations don’t feel safe.

My approach allows us to work not only with the story of an experience but also with the emotional and bodily responses that may have remained long after the event itself has passed.

We work at a pace that feels manageable, without assuming that healing requires you to repeatedly relive everything that happened.

Grief, loss and life transitions

Grief doesn’t only follow death.

We can grieve relationships, fertility, health, careers, families we hoped to have, pregnancies, identities, opportunities and versions of ourselves that no longer exist.

Major transitions can also stir up older losses that we thought had been resolved.

Sometimes people come to therapy because they cannot understand why something that happened years ago suddenly feels so present.

There is no correct timetable for grief.

Therapy can provide somewhere for the loss to be acknowledged, understood and gradually integrated into the life that continues around it.

Pregnancy, birth and becoming a parent

Pregnancy and parenthood can bring enormous joy while simultaneously stirring emotions and experiences that may be completely unexpected.

Pregnancy can increase feelings of vulnerability. Relationships with parents may suddenly look different. Previous losses or traumatic experiences can reappear. Birth may not unfold as expected. And becoming responsible for another human being can challenge your sense of identity, confidence and control.

You may experience anxiety during pregnancy, fear around birth, difficulty after a traumatic birth, postnatal emotional difficulties or simply a profound sense that you don’t recognise yourself anymore.

My background in midwifery alongside psychotherapy gives me a particular understanding of this period.

We can make space for both realities: loving your baby and finding this difficult are not mutually exclusive.

We don’t have to put you into a box

You may recognise yourself in several of these areas.

That’s normal.

Anxiety can be connected with perfectionism. People-pleasing can affect relationships. A pregnancy can awaken unresolved childhood experiences. Grief can make an old coping strategy stop working. Something that looks like low confidence may have its roots somewhere completely unexpected.

This is why I work with the whole person rather than simply treating an isolated symptom.

You don’t have to diagnose yourself or choose the right therapy before you contact me.

You bring what is happening.

Together, we begin to understand it.

Feel more like yourself again

If something you’ve read here has made you think, “That’s me”, we can begin with a conversation.

You don’t need to have worked out exactly what you need or know what you want to say.

Sometimes knowing that you don’t want things to continue as they are is enough of a starting point.

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