As a queer person, and a person with ADHD, I can understand how important it can be to work with a therapist who has at least a basic understanding of what it is like to be a queer or neurodivergent person. I particularly enjoy working with queer and neurodivergent folks, whether these are areas you’re looking to explore in therapy or not.

In my spare time I love playing video games, crocheting and hanging out with my cats!

My Approach

I take a person centred approach to the process of counselling which, to me, means that you, the client, are at the front and centre of every aspect of our work together. I'm not here to tell you what to do or how to live your life, I'm here to facilitate a process by which you can get closer to figuring that out yourself.

I do this by creating an environment where you are free to bring whatever you would like us to work on together without fear of judgment. I will attempt to understand how you experience the world from your point of view.

Feeling that no one truly understands your situation or how you're feeling can be an incredibly lonely and isolating experience and it can feel impossible to untangle the issues you're facing alone. My offer would be to walk alongside you while you work through whatever it is that has brought you to counselling.

Just as I'm not here to tell you how you should live your life, I'm also not necessarily here to tell you what you should or will find useful within the therapy room. The person centred approach is a evidence based therapeutic modality which has shown a great deal of success in improving the wellbeing of people with a huge range of reasons for coming to counselling. However, some clients can find the freedom to fully control the direction taken in counselling to be overwhelming or just unhelpful. I believe that truly putting the person at the centre of the counselling process means building a collaborative relationship where we can talk openly about what is and isn't working and what we might be able to do differently.

For some clients, working collaboratively might mean me being more directive in terms of what we work through in sessions. It might mean explicitly asking the client at the beginning of each session what they would like to focus on, and checking in if it seems that we are going off the path. It could mean having a clearer structure to our sessions or potentially exploring external resources which you might want to try and report back on. Ultimately, the relationship between a particular therapist and a particular client is unique, and I believe that building a therapeutic relationship where you feel listened to, understood and able to give feedback when things aren't working is a key component of effective therapy.

I like the metaphor of clients bringing a big ball of tangled string into counselling sessions. I'm not going to jump in and start physically untangling it myself, I also won't simply instruct you on how to untangle the ball. This is not least because I am not the one holding it and probably not the one best placed to see what needs to be done to untangle it. However, I'm also not here to just sit there as you try to untangle the ball on your own. I might provide you support while you tackle the ball of string, or I might look at it and see if a second set of eyes reveals anything about how we could go about untangling it. I might work alongside you to untangle a specific strand, suggesting ideas for what we might be able to try. This collaborative relationship, where we figure out together how we might untangle this ball of string, is what I aim to build within the therapeutic relationship of counselling and this will likely look very different for different people!

Thank you for indulging the metaphor! Hopefully this helps you to think about what you might find helpful within the therapeutic relationship and how I approach working with clients.

Please do get in touch if you have any questions!