Counselling in Central London or by phone or video call
I am a highly experienced BACP accredited psychotherapist, qualified to work in a number of therapy modalities, including psychodynamic psychotherapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, dynamic interpersonal therapy and sensorimotor psychotherapy. I currently work part-time as a psychotherapist for University College London, providing short term psychodynamic therapy to students, as well as single session therapy when needed. I have responsibilities for risk assessing students and managing their safeguarding. Alongside my work at UCL I have a private practice providing therapy from a consulting room in Central London or by video call or telephone. During my psychodynamic training in the early 2000s, I worked as a psychodynamic therapist in the NHS at Parkside Clinic in North London. I then went into private practice part time. On qualifying as a CBT therapist in 2015, I worked on an Employee Assistance Programme, providing therapy to doctors and hospital consultants who were experiencing mental health difficulties e.g. due to pressure of work.I work with individual adults, on a time-limited or an open-ended basis, with difficulties such as:
When working with CBT and with DIT, the use of questionnaires in sessions helps to identify the nature of the difficulties clients are experiencing and how severely they are affected by those difficulties. This makes it easier to provide the right kind of help and to monitor progress from week to week.
Amongst the aspects of mental health that are explored in CBT are 'core beliefs'. CBT teaches that some of us hold quite unhelpful or inaccurate negative core beliefs about ourselves, the world and others, of which we may be hardly aware. These may have developed during childhood, when we didn't have the ability to think realistically about what was happening to us and around us. Alternatively, negative beliefs about ourselves may have developed when we had a bad experience as an adult. Once such beliefs have taken hold, they can have a big impact on the way we think, feel and behave in our everyday lives. Becoming consciously aware of those beliefs and where they came from can help us reconsider them and replace them over time with more realistic beliefs that better reflect the person we really are or would like to be. This then feeds into positive changes in the way we think, feel and behave day to day.
CBT is mainly focused on what's happening in your life today, and how your thinking and behaviour may be causing you problems but can be changed.
For some clients, a different counselling approach may be more suitable. There are clients for whom it may be important to spend more time talking about painful things that have happened to them in the past. For other clients, who have relationship problems as their main issue, it may be useful to look at whether there are any common themes or repeating patterns that can be identified and addressed.
For clients dealing with trauma - either in terms of a single event or more complex trauma occurring during childhood - it is important to work with the body in order to heal.
As a counsellor with experience of working with clients in a number of different ways, I can talk to you about what might be best after we've had our initial meeting.
Counselling Central London: the consulting room where I practice is very near Euston rail and tube stations.
I offer remote counselling by video call or by telephone.
"As you think, so you become.....Our busy minds are forever jumping to conclusions, manufacturing and interpreting signs that aren't there." Epictetus
