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Twenty-two areas of focus, described properly.

Most therapy websites give you a list of words. Below is what the work actually looks like in each area — what we would examine, what we would practise, and what improvement tends to feel like when it comes.

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Anxiety & stress Depression & mood Past trauma Low self-esteem Infertility & IVF Women’s issues Fertility evaluations Chronic illness Health issues & pain Diet & lifestyle Bariatric evaluations Grief & loss Divorce Blended families Couple issues Parent–child conflict Adolescence Academic difficulties CBT Existential therapy Personality assessment Individual therapy

One · Mind & mood

When your own thinking has become the problem.

Anxiety & stress

Anxiety is not a character flaw and it is not a lack of willpower. It is a threat-detection system that has become over-tuned — scanning constantly, treating uncertainty as danger, and rewarding you with brief relief every time you avoid something. That relief is exactly what keeps it going.

We start by mapping it precisely: what sets it off, what you do next, and what that doing costs you. Then we work on both ends. On the thinking side, we test the predictions your anxiety makes against what actually happens — not with affirmations, but with evidence. On the behavioural side, we rebuild your tolerance for the situations you have been steering around, gradually and on your terms.

What we might work on

  • Panic attacks and the fear of having one in public
  • Health anxiety and the checking-and-reassurance loop
  • Social anxiety, performance anxiety and the post-event replay
  • Generalised worry that jumps from topic to topic
  • Physical symptoms — chest tightness, gut trouble, jaw clenching, insomnia
  • Avoidance that has quietly narrowed your life

Anxiety

How Therapy Can Help You Break Free from Anxiety

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Emotional Wellness

Mind Over Matter: Building Emotional Resilience

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Depression & mood disorders

Depression is not simply sadness. It is a flattening — of energy, of interest, of the sense that anything you do will matter. It lies convincingly, and one of its cleverest lies is that you should wait until you feel better before doing anything differently.

We work in the other direction. Small, deliberate changes in what you do come first; motivation follows behaviour far more reliably than the reverse. Alongside that we examine the beliefs underneath — about your worth, your future, your responsibility for things outside your control — and we look honestly at sleep, movement, alcohol, isolation and anything medical that may be contributing.

What we might work on

  • Behavioural activation — rebuilding a week that supplies something back
  • The inner critic, and where it learned its voice
  • Rumination: the difference between thinking and chewing
  • Persistent low mood that has been there so long it feels like personality
  • Coordinating with your physician or psychiatrist where medication is part of the picture

Depression

Understanding and Overcoming Depression

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Depression

Natural Ways to Combat Depression

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Past trauma

Unresolved trauma rarely announces itself as trauma. It shows up as a startle response out of proportion to the moment, a relationship pattern you cannot explain, a body that will not settle, or a stretch of your history you cannot quite bring into focus. We work at a pace you set, building stability and regulation skills first, then approaching the material itself — never before you are ready, and never in a way that leaves you undone at the end of the hour.

Low self-esteem

Low self-worth is usually not a shortage of achievements — plenty of accomplished people have it. It is a set of rules about what you must do to be acceptable, learned early and never revised. We find the rules, trace where they came from, test them against adult reality, and build a steadier sense of self that does not depend on your last performance review.

Two · Reproductive & women’s health

A genuine specialism, not a line on a list.

I am a member of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and a significant part of my practice is devoted to fertility, loss and the psychology of treatment.

Infertility & IVF support

Infertility is one of the most emotionally punishing experiences I see, and one of the most poorly understood by everyone around it. It is a grief without a funeral, repeated on a monthly cycle, conducted in the language of protocols and dosages, and frequently endured in silence while other people announce pregnancies.

Therapy will not change a test result. What it can do is keep you recognisable to yourself through the process: helping you and your partner stay on the same side, deciding in advance how you will handle the baby showers and the family questions, managing the particular torture of the two-week wait, and making room for grief after a failed cycle instead of rushing straight to the next protocol.

What we might work on

  • Riding out the two-week wait without it consuming the fortnight
  • Grief after a failed cycle, a chemical pregnancy or a miscarriage
  • Couples who are coping in very different styles and hurting each other by accident
  • Decisions about donor gametes, gestational carriers, and when to stop
  • Boundaries and scripts for family, friends and colleagues
  • Anxiety and depression running alongside treatment

RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association maintains peer support groups nationwide — a good complement to individual work.

Infertility

Infertility and IVF Support: Finding Strength, Clarity, and Hope

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Infertility

The Psychological Benefits of Therapy During Fertility Treatment

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Women’s issues

Career and caregiving pulling in opposite directions. Perimenopause nobody warned you about. The invisible labour of keeping a household’s emotional life running. Identity after motherhood, or without it. These are not small complaints, and they respond well to being taken seriously and thought about carefully.

Evaluations for fertility treatment

Many clinics require a psychological consultation before proceeding with donor gametes, gestational surrogacy or certain third-party arrangements. I complete these evaluations with the seriousness they deserve and without treating them as a hurdle — they are often a genuinely useful hour. Reports are prepared promptly for your clinic.

Three · Health, illness & the body

Living well alongside a body that will not fully cooperate.

Coping with chronic illness & chronic pain

A long-term diagnosis takes more than physical health. It takes spontaneity, identity, certain plans, and a great deal of energy spent simply being a patient — appointments, portals, insurance, explaining yourself to people who do not understand.

Psychological work does not imply your symptoms are “in your head”. It addresses the parts that psychology genuinely governs: how a hypervigilant nervous system amplifies pain signals, how boom-and-bust activity cycles make flares worse, how to grieve the version of your life you had planned, and how to build a life that is worth having on the days your body is uncooperative.

What we might work on

  • Pacing and activity planning that reduce the boom-and-bust cycle
  • Pain-related fear, catastrophising and the vigilance loop
  • Grief for the body and the plans you had
  • Communicating with clinicians, employers and family without exhausting yourself
  • Sleep, mood and the medical anxiety that rides alongside a chronic condition

Health issues

A new diagnosis, a frightening test result, a surgery ahead, or recovery that is taking longer than anyone promised. Short-term, focused work here can make a large difference to how the medical part goes.

Diet & lifestyle

Mental and physical health are not separable. Sleep, movement, alcohol, blood sugar and sunlight all show up in the consulting room. We look at them honestly and practically — without moralising, and without pretending a walk cures depression.

Evaluations for bariatric surgery

Most surgical programmes require a pre-operative psychological evaluation. I conduct these thoroughly and respectfully, covering readiness, expectations, eating patterns, support and post-operative adjustment, with a clear report sent to your surgical team.

Four · Loss & transition

Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is something to be accompanied.

Grief & loss

We grieve people. We also grieve marriages, pregnancies, careers, health, friendships, homes, and futures we had already furnished in our minds. The losses nobody throws a funeral for are often the loneliest, because the world does not offer you any of its usual rituals.

There are no tidy stages, and there is no schedule you are behind on. What there is: room to say the true things out loud, help with the guilt and anger that so often ride alongside sadness, and support in finding a way to carry what happened rather than getting over it. Grief does not shrink so much as your life grows back around it.

What we might work on

  • Anticipatory grief while someone is still living
  • Complicated or prolonged grief that has not shifted with time
  • Anniversaries, birthdays and the dread of the date on the calendar
  • Grief that no one around you recognises as grief
  • Guilt, relief, anger — the emotions nobody warned you would come

Grief and Loss

Grief and Loss: Finding Your Way Through the Pain

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Mental Health

Why So Many of Us Feel Off Today

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Divorce

Divorce is a legal event wrapped around an emotional one, and the two run on completely different timetables. We work on the grief, the anger, the identity shift, the co-parenting logistics, and the extremely practical question of how to speak to your children about it without making them carry your side.

Blended families

New partners, step-siblings, competing loyalties, and the impossible expectation that everyone should feel like family immediately. Realistic timelines, clear roles and workable household agreements do more good here than good intentions.

Five · Relationships & family

The argument is rarely about the thing you are arguing about.

Couple issues

Most couples do not arrive because they have run out of love. They arrive because they have run out of ways to talk about the same three things. The content varies — money, sex, in-laws, the dishwasher — but the pattern is usually stable, and the pattern is what we work on.

Sessions are structured so neither of you is put on trial. We slow the argument down enough to see who reaches for pursuit and who reaches for distance, we practise repair rather than winning, and we address the underlying question that is nearly always present: do you still turn towards me?

What we might work on

  • Communication that has hardened into a script
  • Rebuilding trust after an affair or a serious breach
  • Sexual disconnection and mismatched desire
  • Parenting disagreements and the alliance underneath them
  • Deciding, with clear eyes, whether to stay

Parent–child conflict

When every conversation turns into a negotiation or a standoff. I work with parents, with young people, and often with both — separately and together — to lower the temperature and rebuild something that is not purely adversarial.

Adolescence

Identity, social pressure, phones, academic stress, and the deeply unfashionable fact of having feelings. Teenagers usually arrive sceptical. My aim in the first session is simply that they leave thinking this might not be a waste of their time.

Academic difficulties

For children, adolescents and young adults whose performance has slipped or stalled. We look for what is actually driving it — anxiety, attention, motivation, perfectionism, learning differences, or something happening at home — before assuming it is effort.

Six · Approaches & assessment

The methods behind the work.

Individual therapy

A personalised, compassionate approach tailored to each person rather than to a diagnostic label. Fifty minutes, usually weekly to begin with, with a shared direction we review openly as we go.

Cognitive-behavioural therapy

Among the most thoroughly researched approaches available, and highly effective for anxiety, depression, insomnia, panic and health anxiety. Structured, collaborative and skills-based — you leave with tools, not just insight. I am certified in CBT and use it as the backbone of much of my work.

Existential therapy

For the questions that CBT does not reach: meaning, mortality, freedom, responsibility, and what you actually want a life to be for. Particularly useful in midlife, after a diagnosis, after a loss, or when everything is objectively fine and something is still missing.

Personality assessment

Structured assessments can illuminate strengths, blind spots, stress responses and interpersonal patterns — useful for personal insight, career direction and couples who keep colliding. Always interpreted in conversation, never handed over as a verdict.

Not sure which of these fits?

That is a completely normal place to start.

Most people do not arrive with a category. Tell me what has been happening and we will work out together what we are dealing with.

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