Schema Therapy & Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples

Supportive, Insightful & LGBTQIA+ Affirming Relationship Therapy

Navigating relationships can be both beautiful and challenging. Whether you’re facing communication difficulties, emotional distance, repeated patterns of conflict, or want to deepen your connection, couples therapy offers a space for growth, understanding, and meaningful change.

As a Counselling Psychologist, I bring together two powerful, evidence-based approaches—Schema Therapy and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)—to help you and your partner understand the deeper emotional needs and longstanding patterns that shape your relationship.

Schema Therapy helps us explore the emotional “blueprints” we each bring into relationships—often shaped by early life experiences. These schemas can lead to recurring patterns of disconnection, defensiveness, or feeling stuck. By identifying and gently working through these patterns, we make space for new, healthier ways of relating.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) focuses on the emotional bond between you and your partner. It helps you move away from cycles of conflict or withdrawal, and toward greater emotional safety, connection, and intimacy. In therapy, we work together to identify the emotional or attachment-based needs beneath the arguments, and build secure emotional foundations.

I offer a compassionate, non-judgmental space that respects and affirms all identities and relationship structures. As an LGBTQIA+ friendly therapist, I understand the unique pressures and dynamics that may impact queer and gender-diverse relationships, and I’m here to support you with sensitivity, openness, and care.

If you’re looking to break old cycles, strengthen your connection, and grow together in a supportive environment, I welcome you to get in touch.

What we eat, how we eat it and our relationship to food is an important component of overall wellbeing. There is growing evidence that a diet rich in variety and in particular omega 3, like the Mediterranean diet, can help mood. However, more significant that what you eat is your relationship to food, the body and how you take care of yourself in the context of food, eating and general wellbeing. Sometimes giving yourself permission for cake and coffee is more self-care than fearing breaking food rules. I can help you make sense of the advice out there and tailor it to your needs, realistically.

Psychological support

Anxiety and depression may be common, distressing and unwanted, but they may also be telling you something about yourself. Taking a curious stance on how anxiety and depressions are two sides of the same coin can offer insight into how better to listen to what your body and mind is telling you, and how to attend to that in a compassionate way. Making sense of the nervous system and how we learn to respond to events or trauma can be a shining light out of the darkness. Sometimes though, you may need a place to make sense of your thoughts and feelings, that feels safe and supportive, without judgement or solutions.

Therapeutic Support for Eating Disorders

Meaning-Making, Debunking Food Myths, Emotional Safety, and Whole-Person Recovery

Eating disorders are rarely just about food. They often emerge as deeply personal strategies—crafted in response to pain, disconnection, identity struggles, trauma, or a world that feels overwhelming or unsafe. Whether through control, invisibility, perfectionism, or rebellion, disordered eating can become a powerful, though costly, way to make sense of your inner world.

In my work with clients, I take a meaning-making approach grounded in Schema Therapy—exploring how eating disorders develop not only as coping mechanisms, but also as ways of expressing, regulating, or even surviving unspoken emotional experiences.

We look together at how core patterns—formed early in life around attachment, safety, identity, and emotional needs—can shape one’s relationship with food, body, and self. This includes exploring how gender identity, neurodivergence, trauma history, and unrecognised emotional needs may underpin disordered eating patterns. For many, these patterns are not just behaviours, but embodied stories—attempts to articulate something vital, to make the invisible legible.

Through the lens of Schema Therapy, we identify and work with the critical inner voices, unmet needs, and protective parts that keep disordered eating in place. At the same time, I integrate polyvagal-informed somatic tools to support nervous system regulation, helping clients find felt safety and reconnect with their bodies in a way that isn’t overwhelming or shame-based.

Importantly, I also bring in evidence-based nutritional strategies to support practical recovery. This includes meal planning guidance, psychoeducation on the gut-brain connection, and helping clients understand the biological effects of restriction, bingeing, and stress on appetite, metabolism, and mood. For many, this step bridges the gap between insight and action—making recovery feel more doable, less abstract, and more anchored in the realities of daily life. We’ll also debunk bad science and out-of context or ‘anorexified’ public health messages, and learn how to interpret these dictates more appropriately.

My approach is compassionate, curious, and collaborative. I don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all model of recovery. Instead, I walk alongside you to explore what your eating difficulties have meant, what they’ve protected you from, and how we can build new, sustainable ways of coping—grounded in emotional truth, nourishment, and self-respect.

Eating disorder therapy is available to adolescents from age 13, and adults.

Therapeutic Support for Corporate Burnout & Career Identity Shifts

Healing the Drive to Overwork, Reclaiming Self, and Redefining Success

Burnout in high-performing professionals is rarely just about long hours or poor work-life balance. It often stems from a deeper emotional architecture—patterns of belief, behaviour, and identity that once helped you succeed but now leave you feeling exhausted, detached, and questioning who you are beyond your role.

Whether you’re in the depths of burnout, recovering from a breakdown, or navigating a major career transition, my approach offers a space to pause, reflect, and rebuild from the inside out.

I work integratively, combining Schema Therapy, Polyvagal-informed nervous system regulation, and meaning-making practices to address both the emotional and physiological roots of professional burnout and identity collapse.

At the heart of burnout, I often see core schemas driving relentless internal pressure:

• Unrelenting Standards Schema – the belief that you must constantly strive, achieve, and outperform to feel worthy or safe.

• Failure Schema – a hidden conviction that you’re never quite good enough, regardless of external success.

• Self-Sacrifice or Subjugation Schemas – patterns of prioritising others’ needs, expectations, or demands above your own capacity.

These schemas often activate overcompensatory modes—such as the Tireless Performer, the Detached Professional, or the Perfectionist. These parts may push you to achieve while suppressing rest, vulnerability, or emotional expression. Over time, this leads to disconnection from self, strained relationships, and a body that begins to protest through fatigue, anxiety, and even illness.

In therapy, we work together to understand these internal systems with compassion, not judgment. We may use Schema rescripting for example, to heal the roots of these patterns, and polyvagal-informed somatic tools to help your nervous system remember what safety, rest, and emotional regulation feel like—especially when stillness has become intolerable. We may also take a pragmatic look at leadership style and the corporate culture to contextualise and identify existing system-based problems that make thriving challenging.

For many clients, burnout marks a deeper shift: a questioning of identity, purpose, and direction. If you’ve recently left a role, changed careers, or are contemplating a new path, I also support you in rescripting your sense of self. Who are you without the title, the output, the salary, the external validation? We explore how to build a more sustainable, values-led identity that honours your humanity as well as your capability.

This is not just recovery. It’s a reconfiguration of how you relate to yourself, your work, and the world around you. If you’re ready to move beyond survival mode and create a professional life rooted in clarity, emotional sustainability, and self-trust—I’m here to walk that path with you.

Therapy for Childhood & Historical Trauma

Understanding the Past, Reclaiming the Present, Healing the Whole Self

Unresolved trauma from childhood or earlier life doesn’t always look like trauma. It can show up as chronic anxiety or low mood, intense self-criticism, difficulties trusting others, feeling emotionally disconnected—or being unable to sustain healthy relationships. It may present as patterns of addiction, perfectionism, people-pleasing, emotional volatility, or a deep sense of shame. For some, it becomes a lifelong pattern of survival rather than living.

Many clients I work with come to therapy unsure why they feel “too much” or “not enough.” Some have been labelled with personality disorders. Others identify with symptoms of Complex PTSD (C-PTSD)—including emotional flashbacks, chronic emptiness, relational instability, or dissociation. Often, these experiences are rooted in early environments where core emotional needs went unmet—where safety, stability, love, or attunement were inconsistent or absent.

As a Counselling Psychologist, I work with an integrative framework that combines Schema Therapy, attachment-based therapy, and Polyvagal-informed somatic work. This approach allows us to understand trauma not just as something that happened, but as something that shaped how you relate to yourself, others, and your world.

Schema Therapy

We identify and work with the schemas—deep emotional patterns and beliefs formed in early life—that continue to shape your sense of self and your behaviour. Common trauma-linked schemas include defectiveness, abandonment, mistrust, emotional deprivation, and unrelenting standards. These can lead to overcompensating, avoidance, or surrendering behaviours that may feel rigid, confusing, or self-defeating. Together, we begin to soften these patterns and develop healthier, more supportive internal narratives.

Attachment-Based Therapy

When trauma occurs in the context of early relationships, it disrupts our ability to form secure bonds. Many clients struggle with intimacy, trust, emotional regulation, or chronic fear of rejection. Through a safe and attuned therapeutic relationship, we explore how your early attachment experiences shaped these dynamics, and begin the process of developing secure internal models—where connection no longer feels threatening or unsafe.

Polyvagal-Informed Somatic Work

Trauma also lives in the body. Using principles of Polyvagal Theory, we explore how your nervous system may be stuck in chronic states of hyperarousal (fight/flight), collapse (freeze/shutdown), or fawning (people-pleasing). We use practical somatic tools to support nervous system regulation, helping you access calm, presence, and safety in the body—especially if these have long felt out of reach.

This work is not about pathologising you—it’s about understanding how your symptoms once made sense in the context of what you lived through. It’s about making space for healing, integration, and new choices. Whether you’re struggling with a formal C-PTSD diagnosis, personality patterns that feel hard to shift, or just a lifelong feeling of disconnection from your true self, therapy offers a path forward.

If you’re ready to understand how your past may be shaping your present—and to begin building a future based on safety, self-trust, and authentic connection—I’m here to walk that journey with you.