About me
Hello, I’m Ali, a counsellor and psychotherapist. Welcome to my profile. I am a BACP registered counsellor and have a UKCP accredited MSc in Psychotherapy and Counselling.
I have experience of working with difficulties related to anxiety, depression, neurodivergence, trauma, relationships, self-esteem, identity, gender, addiction, and bereavement amongst others.
I offer a calm, safe, and confidential space for you to bring yourself. Empathy, curiosity, and understanding are the foundation of my practice.
My Approach:
I take a psychodynamic and person-centered approach. This means we’ll work together to understand the emotional and relational roots of your difficulties, notice the once protective patterns that keep those difficulties in place, and help you experience buried feelings in a way that allows for greater freedom and growth. It’s important this happens at your pace, honoring your individuality, strengths, and potential.
Collaboration is key part of my approach. This involves building a shared understanding of the problems you want to address, what their causes are, and how we can make therapeutic progress towards your goals together.
Areas of interest:
Anxiety: Tension, panic attacks, racing heartbeat, shortness of breath, dizziness, nausea, and brain fog are some of the ways anxiety can be experienced in the body. Anxiety can be managed in many ways, including rumination, overthinking, avoidance, withdrawal, people-pleasing, emotion suppression, dissociation, and perfectionism. I’m interested in helping people understand their anxiety, recognize the patterns they develop to manage it, and explore the emotions and experiences beneath it in ways that build capacity for self-regulation.
Depression: Depression can involve persistent low mood, low self confidence, loneliness, isolation, self-criticism, self-sabotage, lack of motivation, and lack of joy. Beneath this often lies painful conflicts between emotions such as longing for closeness, grief around loss, anger around hurt, guilt or shame around anger, and other unmet needs. These emotional struggles can give rise to protective patterns that can prolong suffering, such as turning anger inwards, withdrawing from relationships, or self-neglect. I’m interested in helping people understand and experience the emotions under these limiting patterns, creating greater freedom to experience connection, self-acceptance, and joy.
Difference: Minority experiences, whether it’s difference in gender, neurodiversity, race, class, culture, or religion, can come with unique difficulties. I’m interested in exploring how difference affects our sense of self, sense of belonging, and our relationships, alongside the richness and strengths difference can bring.
Transpersonal: Religious and spiritual experiences and communities can make for a central source of meaning and identity. By the same coin, they can be a source of pain, conflict, and guilt. Whatever your worldview, I welcome exploring these experiences as part of therapy.
Training, qualifications & experience
I have several years of experience working therapeutically with individuals in both short and long-term settings. This includes work within higher education, a community interest organization, and within the voluntary sector. These settings have given me the opportunity to work with people facing a broad range of emotional, relational, and psychological difficulties.
My training is originally integrative and experiential, incorporating trauma-informed, transcultural, attachment-based, and existential perspectives. Because our problems, identity, personality, and history are fundamentally interconnected, I aim to understand each person as a whole through a variety of lenses.
Qualifications:
- MSc in Integrative Psychotherapy and Counselling, University of Warwick
- B. A. (Hons) in Philosophy, University of Warwick
Member organisations
BACP is one of the UK’s leading professional bodies for counselling and psychotherapy with around 60,000 members. The Association has several different categories of membership, including Student Member, Individual Member, Registered Member MBACP, Registered Accredited Member MBACP (Accred) and Senior Registered Accredited Member MBACP (Snr Acccred). Registered and accredited members are listed on the BACP Register, which shows that they have demonstrated BACP’s recommended standards for training, proficiency and ethical practice. The BACP Register was the first register of psychological therapists to be accredited by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA). Accredited and senior accredited membership are voluntary categories for members who choose to undertake a rigorous application and assessment process to demonstrate additional standards around practice, training and supervision. Individual members will have completed an appropriate counselling or psychotherapy course and started to practise, but they won’t appear on the BACP Register until they've demonstrated that they meet the standards for registration. Student members are still in the process of completing their training. All members are bound by the BACP Ethical Framework and a Professional Conduct Procedure.
Accredited register membership
The Accredited Register Scheme was set up in 2013 by the Department of Health (DoH) as a way to recognise organisations that hold voluntary registers which meet certain standards. These standards are set by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA).
This therapist has indicated that they belong to an Accredited Register.
Areas of counselling I deal with
Therapies offered
Fees
£55.00 per session
Additional information
If you’re interested in working with me, I offer a free introductory audio or video call.
Sessions are charged at £55 per fifty-minute session.
When I work
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