Psychotherapy offers a confidential space to explore what’s happening beneath the surface - thoughts, emotions, patterns, relationships, and the ways your nervous system has learned to cope.

I work both in Carrickfergus (near Belfast) and online.

Can therapy help me?

Some examples of why people come to see me include:

- relationship or family difficulties

- trauma (particularly related to childhood experiences)

- identity (neurodivergence / gender / sexual identity)

- anxiety

- feeling low or depressed

- life changes and transitions

- low self worth

You may feel as though the “same old” dynamics and situations keep happening – different scenarios but the same familiar feelings and reactions. You're exhausted, all your energy seems to be taken up just about coping let alone trying to find solutions or get clarity to make any decisions.

Or maybe it feels like you've spent so long trying to fit in, to be who others seem to want you to be. You know it's time to slow down, to be seem and understood without masking or diluting who you really are. This isn't about fixing you; it’s about finally coming home to yourself.

I'm a qualified and accredited psychotherapist with 25 years' experience. Together, we give close attention to who you are at your core. We support healing and integration of the aspects of you which have been harmed, denied and suppressed. This in turn helps parts of you which have been over-working to keep all this at bay to soften and change.

Your sense of clarity and focus grows through therapy, your confidence increases and your choices become more fulfilling.

How I work

My psychotherapy approach is informed by:

Relational safety and lived experience: no requirement to mask or perform
Creativity: most of our deepest hurts and fears are stuck beneath cognitive awareness therefore words are rarely enough
Internal Family Systems (IFS): working gently with different parts of self
Neurodiversity-affirming practice: honouring neurodivergent ways of being
Trauma-aware and nervous system focus: meeting your "bodymind", not just your thoughts

I am not in the business of making things awkward or difficult. I am open and friendly and will support you to be as comfortable as you can be. I co-create a pace and process that makes sense for you.

This means sessions that can be slow, curious, embodied, and attuned to your timing rather than an external roadmap.

To find out more about my approach, you might like to read my post here.

Trauma is not what happens to you; it is what happens inside of you as a result of what happens or doesn't happen.

Another way to say this is that trauma occurs when the internal system is too overwhelmed to cope with something and there is no safety available before, during or after to lean into or mitigate it.

Sometimes there is an event, such as a car accident or natural disaster, and this can be labelled "shock" trauma. Other times the trauma is developmental, for example prolonged misattunement between a child and their caregivers.

The word trauma comes from the Greek word for wound. Trauma in a psychological context is therefore a sensitive area which is particularly painful when touched. It can also seem like our psychological wounds are covered in a kind of scar tissue which is inflexible and numb.

When we think about healing trauma we can consider the idea of "making whole", which was the meaning of the old English word which "heal" was derived from.

Trauma disconnects us from ourselves by splitting off, hyper activating and shutting down many parts of our bodies and minds. And the healing process often comes from reconnecting and reintegrating these parts into the whole.

Can therapy help me?

How I work

A brief note on Trauma