Contacting Me

Individual psychotherapy is a one-on-one discussion between myself as the therapist and the client, who is the person seeking treatment. Individual counselling or psychotherapy (often referred to as talk therapy) is a process through which clients work one-on-one with me to explore aspects of their lives that they would like to change, improve or gain a deeper understanding of. This could include working through past experiences or memories, current situations, feelings, beliefs, behaviours, personal challenges, influential memories, setting personal goals, and working towards building their desired lifeworld. We form a therapeutic relationship that together, enables mutual trust and personal growth.

Family or group counselling is intended to establish a sense of wellbeing and stability within a family/group context. Creating a sense of security within a family allows for each individual family member needs to be fulfilled so that they may each reach their optimal potential. This often requires families to embrace a change process which becomes a key focus of the family therapy process.

Psychological assessments are designed to help gain clarity into an individual’s functioning in specific areas of development as well as their strengths and weaknesses. An assessment can be conducted on many different areas of functioning, such as: intellectual functioning, cognitive functioning, learning capability, academic skills (reading, writing, mathematics, spelling), visual-spatial skills, emotional functioning and behaviour. Assessment results are helpful in gaining insight into a person’s functioning and thus allow for better recommendations and more effective psychotherapy.

Couples or marital counselling is intended to support optimal relationships through resolving interpersonal conflicts and establishing common goals for the relationship. The foundation of this counselling process is to develop a deep understanding of one’s partner, their personality, their values and their needs and then learning to use that knowledge to support each other’s well being and achieve satisfaction. Developing self-knowledge and the skills of emotional regulation (to manage one's emotions) are key components of the couples counselling process.

Grief counselling aims to support people who have been exposed to trauma or are grieving some form of loss. This may include loss such as grieving after the death of a loved one, coping major life changes (such as consequences resulting from The COVID-19 pandemic or events such as divorce) or coping with traumatic events (such as violent crime or gender-based violence).

In these situations where grief and trauma are the outcome, a wide range of emotions may be experienced. During psychotherapy, we explore these emotions in order to process them and gradually work towards acceptance of the changes you may be presented with in your life. As the psychotherapy process progresses, we aim to establish new meaning in your life.

Career guidance is a service whereby I provide support to young adults and adults regarding selection of a career path and decisions around career progression. Career guidance requires a combination of a healthy level of both self-knowledge and career-knowledge. I use narrative career counselling techniques regularly to support clients to foster these knowledge bases in order to effectively provide career guidance. Psychometric testing is also utilised extensively to provide effective career guidance.

Life coaching is different from psychotherapy in that it focuses on different components of development. Psychotherapy focuses fundamentally on mental health and wellbeing and is a longer-term process. Psychotherapy places an emphasis on the past and developing introspective skills to reflect on one’s life to be able to resolve issues.

Coaching on the other hand is more future orientated, supporting clients to clarify life-goals, and navigate a path to reaching those goals through identifying potential obstacles and working through them. Life coaching does not require a diagnosis of any disorder as psychotherapy usually does. Rather, it is an action-orientated approach that requires the client to demonstrate agency and self-motivation to reach goals that they set for themselves.

One of my passions is to be able to teach. I’ve had the opportunity to do so over the past decade through lecturing psychology students at various levels. Professional supervision allows me to nurture my own passion while providing a valuable service to colleagues through supervision. My choice of supervision model focuses on supporting psychologists to develop the professional/therapeutic skills and the master the process of understanding their clients’ perspectives to be able to deliver a meaningful counselling service.