How I Work
Beginning therapy means trusting someone with parts of yourself that may not always be easy to reveal or understand. I do not take that trust for granted; I see it as something that develops over time through attentive listening and working together.
Relational Psychoanalysis is the framework that guides my work. Over more than fifteen years of clinical practice, I have learned that understanding what causes suffering also means listening to your history, your relationships, and the ways in which your mind and body have learned to respond and protect you. Within this framework, where appropriate, I integrate EMDR, work with different parts of the self, and use mindfulness practices—not to apply the same method to everyone, but to develop a therapeutic process that respects your individuality, inner resources, and pace.
- Relational Psychoanalysis
- EMDR and Trauma Processing
- Working with Parts of the Self
- Mindfulness, Body Awareness and Emotional Regulation
A safe space to grow and explore your difficulties in depth
With over 15 years’ experience as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in London, my approach seeks to understand the origins of your symptoms in depth. In psychotherapy, symptoms are not simply problems to be removed: they can be meaningful expressions of fears, inner conflicts and unconscious dynamics which, once understood, can open the way to genuine change. This depth of work can be particularly helpful for people experiencing trauma, anxiety or depression, or feeling caught in conflictual relationships that seem impossible to resolve.
Trauma is not always immediately recognisable. You may know which painful experience affected you and recognise it as the source of your distress. In other cases, the experience that contributed to your suffering may be difficult to identify or connect to symptoms such as anxiety or relationship difficulties, leaving you feeling stuck without a clear explanation. Together, we can explore the origins of this distress, understand where it may come from and consider the deeper meaning it has taken on.
Through therapy, we can begin to make sense of your suffering and find a way of managing and moving through it that feels right for you, gradually loosening the patterns that prevent you from moving forward.
Areas of Specialisation
Anxiety, Stress and Panic Attacks
Anxiety can become a background noise accompanying every decision: you anticipate what might go wrong, replay conversations, seek reassurance or try to keep everything under control. During periods of prolonged stress, this vigilance can become so familiar that it feels impossible to switch off. At other times, anxiety breaks through as a panic attack and, suddenly, even your body no longer feels like a place you can trust.
To feel safe, you may avoid certain situations, prepare endlessly or repeatedly seek reassurance. These strategies can provide short-term relief, but they often end up narrowing your life around fear. In therapy, I do not treat anxiety as an isolated symptom to be controlled at all costs. We explore what it may be trying to protect you from, which emotions or conflicts make it more intense, and what continues to maintain it in the present. Understanding is one part of the work; the other involves developing new ways of staying with uncertainty and emotions without anxiety having to take over.
Self-Esteem and Feelings of Inadequacy
You may be competent, achieve important goals and be highly regarded by others, yet continue to feel that you are never quite enough. Success quickly becomes the new normal, while a mistake, criticism or rejection seems to confirm a deeper doubt about yourself. You raise the standard, prepare more, compare yourself with others and try not to disappoint. But the goalpost moves every time you get close.
Working on self-esteem does not mean trying to convince yourself of your worth or replacing negative thoughts with positive affirmations. In therapy, we explore how the inner gaze through which you judge yourself developed, which relationships taught you to associate your worth with achievement, usefulness or approval, and how this continues to influence your choices. The aim is not to eliminate every insecurity, but to no longer have to prove your worth continually before allowing yourself to want, choose, set a boundary or tolerate a mistake.
Relationship Difficulties and Repeating Patterns
You may find yourself entering relationships that appear different but always lead to the same place: pursuing someone who pulls away, withdrawing when someone comes closer, avoiding conflict or taking responsibility for other people’s feelings. Even when you recognise the pattern, knowing that it repeats is not necessarily enough to interrupt it. This way of relating may contain a long-standing attempt to find closeness, protection or recognition without exposing yourself again to the same hurt.
In relational psychotherapy, relationships are not explored only as something that happens outside therapy. The expectations, fears and ways in which you seek or avoid closeness may also emerge within the therapeutic relationship, where they can be noticed and thought about in the present. This makes it possible not only to understand where these patterns originated, but also to experience different ways of relating, setting boundaries and remaining connected to another person without losing touch with yourself.
Trauma and the Effects of Traumatic Experiences
You may know exactly which experience changed something within you. Or you may find it difficult to connect what you feel today to a single event: trauma can also take shape through repeated relational experiences in which protection, stability or emotional recognition were missing. Even when you know that the danger has passed, your body may tell a different story. Intrusive memories, nightmares, shame, feeling detached from yourself or difficulty trusting others can all be ways in which what happened continues to make itself felt.
In our work together, you do not need to tell everything at once or relive the experience before you feel ready to approach it. We work with what happened at your pace, first building a foundation of stability and sufficient resources. I integrate relational psychoanalysis, attention to the body and, when appropriate, EMDR, both to understand the meaning of the experience and to work with the way traumatic memory remains active in the present. We cannot erase the past, but we can work towards helping it find a place within your story without continuing to return as though it were still happening.
Depression, Grief and Life Transitions
Depression does not always look like obvious sadness. You may continue to work, care for others and meet every commitment, while nothing quite reaches you any more. What once brought pleasure becomes an obligation, the future feels flat, and you may feel as though you are watching your life from the outside. A loss, a separation, moving to another country, or a change in your work, family or sense of who you are can create a rupture and leave you feeling distant from the person you once were.
Grief is not necessarily the same as depression, and it is not only about someone dying. Every significant change, even one you wanted, may require you to let go of a part of your life or yourself. In therapy, we can make space for what has been lost, as well as for anger, guilt and ambivalence, without rushing to bring the pain to a close. We can also explore whether a present loss reactivates earlier ones and begin to rebuild a sense of continuity between who you were, what has changed and what may still become possible. The aim is not to return to how things were, but to move forward without denying what you have lost.
Deeper Self-Understanding and Relational Growth
Not everyone begins psychotherapy because something has stopped working. You may have achieved important goals and built a stable life, yet continue to feel that it does not fully reflect who you are. Sometimes the question is not only how to feel better, but what you truly want, why certain choices continue to repeat themselves and which parts of you have been given too little space.
A psychoanalytic process is not about becoming a more efficient version of yourself. It allows you to approach desires, contradictions and expectations that you have made your own, as well as ways of adapting that continue to operate without your full awareness. What currently appears to be an obstacle may reveal a tension between different parts of you. Putting these experiences into words and making sense of them does not mean gaining control over everything, but developing greater freedom in your choices, relationships and way of living.
Where to Begin
You do not need to arrive at the first session with a precise explanation of what you are feeling or already know which kind of therapy might be helpful. The initial sessions allow us to get to know one another and assess your needs: we explore what brings you to therapy, your history, what you need and what you would like to change.
The quality of the therapeutic encounter is itself part of the decision. This time allows us to understand whether and how we might work together, without assuming that there is a ready-made solution or a single therapeutic path that suits everyone.
If you are considering starting therapy, you can read more about how the process works or contact me.