Specialisms

Families, Couples & Systemic Work

This is my primary training and deepest area of expertise. Systemic therapy looks beyond the individual to the patterns between people — the feedback loops, unspoken rules, and loyalties that shape how families and couples move. Most of what couples and families experience as “the problem” is actually a pattern: something that developed for good reasons and has since taken on a life of its own. My work draws on Systemic & Family Therapy and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for both couples and families. I am also a qualified Systemic Supervisor. My particular clinical interest is in families with adolescents — young people in crisis, and the family systems trying to hold them.

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Trauma & EMDR

Trauma is not a disorder. It is a survival response that has outlasted its usefulness — an alarm that saved you once and is still ringing, years later, shaping what you avoid and what you fear. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) works below the level of narrative. Rather than requiring you to talk through events in detail, it helps the brain do what it already knows how to do: process, integrate, and move on. I have extensive EMDR training with both adults and children, and a particular interest in how trauma manifests in families across generations — not just in individuals.

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Emotional Regulation — DBT, ACT & Structural Work

Some people arrive at therapy too ungrounded, too dysregulated, or too frightened for open-ended reflection. They need something solid to stand on before they can look around. Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) gave me a rigorous language for emotional regulation and the body’s role in it. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) adds something complementary — helping people build a different relationship with difficult thoughts and feelings, rather than fighting them, while clarifying what actually matters. Sometimes the most therapeutic thing you can do is teach someone a concrete skill. I hold both the importance of space and the importance of ground.

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Contemplative & Mindfulness-Based Work

I have a long-standing personal practice in Buddhist meditation, including extended silent retreats, and am completing a two-year training in Vajrayana Spiritual Care. What contemplative practice gave me that clinical training hadn’t is direct experience of stepping outside the story altogether — the gap between our concepts and reality where most suffering actually lives. It shapes how I sit with people: with more patience, more curiosity about what is actually here rather than what the story says is here, and less investment in resolving discomfort quickly.

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Family Therapy for Eating Disorders

Eating disorders are rarely about food. They are about connection — about families trying to reach each other across a divide they can’t name, and about young people finding the only form of control available to them in situations that feel overwhelming. I am trained in Family Therapy for Anorexia Nervosa (FT-AN), which works with the whole family system rather than the individual in isolation. This approach recognises that recovery is not something a young person does alone — and that the family, with the right support, is one of the most powerful resources available.

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Cultural Identity & Cross-Cultural Transitions

I grew up in South Africa and arrived in the UK in my twenties — carrying a first language nobody here spoke, and navigating the invisible labour of belonging in a country that wasn’t mine. I know what it costs to start again: the masking of difference, the paperwork and the loneliness, the quiet determination it takes to build a life somewhere new. This isn’t background colour — it directly informs how I work with people navigating questions of identity, cultural displacement, immigration, and what it means to live between worlds. This work doesn’t require a shared background. It requires a therapist who takes it seriously.

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Psychedelic Integration

Traditionally, psychedelic or entheogenic experiences happened within communities — with ritual, preparation, and shared meaning-making to hold what arose. That context is largely gone. People now have powerful, disorienting, or transformative experiences in settings that offer little support for what comes after. Integration work is the process of making meaning from those experiences — finding language for what emerged, understanding what shifted, and learning how to carry it into ordinary life. I have completed extensive training in Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy (ATMA CENA) and have a genuine interest in this area. Psychedelic-assisted therapy is not yet legal in the UK — but integration work is, and it’s where I can currently be most useful. I am available for this work online on an occasional basis.