About me

I trained as a counselling psychologist and BABCP-accredited CBT therapist, and I've been practising for over twenty years, first in NHS and hospital settings, now from my own practice in Bloomsbury and Ealing.

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I've lived across three continents, with personal and family history running through North and South America, and Western and Eastern Europe as well. That kind of exposure means I don't take any one culture's assumptions about a "normal" life as neutral. It matters in a city like London, in a world as globalised as this one, where most of the people I see are navigating more than one culture, or none that quite fits them. I'm slow to treat a client's distress as purely individual, and quick to ask what conditions, family, culture, economics, the specific decade someone is living through, produced it.

 

My clinical work is integrative: CBT, schema therapy, and compassion-focused approaches, alongside creativity as a venue for emotional regulation and sense-making, brought together depending on what's actually in front of me rather than applied as fixed tracks. But increasingly, the frame I bring to all of it is the one I wrote about in The Orchid Mind: that most of us are somewhere on a spectrum between orchid and dandelion, some more shaped by our environment than others, and that treating a person's struggles as purely internal, a chemical imbalance, a faulty thought pattern, a diagnosis to manage, often lets the actual conditions off the hook.

 

I'm not against diagnosis or medication. Both are sometimes the right and necessary answer. What I resist is reaching for either reflexively, before asking whether the more honest problem sits outside the person in front of me. My work is to help you map both: the inner conditions you can tend directly, and the outer ones that may need to change too, and to keep working when the outer ones won't move as fast as you'd like.

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I also write. The Orchid Mind: Cultivating the Ideal Conditions for Your Nature is out now, and I publish regularly on @iwonderpsychologist , my Substack.