This professional is available for new clients.
This professional is available for new clients.
About me
I am an experienced counsellor (BACP Accredited) and Emotion-Focused Therapist (Accredited), practising in my private consulting room in West End Edinburgh. I work with individual adults, in person and online.
When might therapy or a personal development process be helpful?
If you are noticing that life becomes too difficult to manage, challenging experiences become overwhelming, anxiety keeps building up, and your familiar ways of approaching these no longer seem to work, you are not alone. Old helpful responses and strategies are eventually experienced as unhelpful in the present.
Problems Develop when we habitually ignore our experiences, especially when we block unwanted feelings, as we then miss an opportunity to understand ourselves and find it harder to help ourselves. Emotions are ‘organic body messengers’ and such messages will not 'just go away'. E-motion is body energy-in-motion, signalling what we are experiencing (our reality) and what we need to do to adapt to the moment, such as finding safety.
When suppressed, emotions such as sadness, anger, shame, and guilt, even joy, build up within the body, awaiting opportunities to be released. Like air in a balloon, energy in the body might become too difficult to contain, easily triggered when 'pressed', and it can eventually be released with less self-control, often resulting in messy interactions. For example, you might experience intense anxiety as if you are in danger, and your response could be avoidance (e.g. not going out, not applying for a job). This anxiety could be active within you in a way that is out of proportion to the current situation, and hence interfering with your wellbeing and prosperity, limiting your enjoyment in newer opportunities.
In my therapeutic work, I am interested in my client’s growing self-understanding and related well-being. I promote your self-empowerment and autonomy, and we work collaboratively towards your fulness.
How might you notice that the therapeutic process is working?
Change in life experience is not as effective and long-lasting when just cognitively planned through behaviour strategies. Reason alone is not enough. Lasting change can be experienced when the symptoms have been addressed and root issues appropriately processed. For example, you may eventually notice you no longer experience the familiar disturbing symptoms in certain circumstances and your responses may come to feel more natural and adaptive to the current situations.
How therapy practice might unfold:
- I can offer an initial brief (30 min) consultation (at no cost).
- Short-term therapy can be planned 4-12 sessions.
- Long-term therapy can have an unspecified number of sessions, but will include our regular reviews of the progress, and if necessary, adjusting the focus of the therapeutic work.
The initial consultations offer us quality opportunity to:
- Identify what we will be working on
- Develop our therapeutic alliance (therapeutic relationship)
Development in further consultations:
- I encourage and may help you to notice how you feel in the moment, or have been experiencing (perhaps in build-up) before the session.
- I follow what you share and may help you identify what needs attention. This could include focus on the coherence / incoherence between body and mind (thoughts), or confusion.
- Depending on what is being presented, we may go deeper, with the most appropriate approach I can identify in the moment, such as processing the energy you feel by using emotion-focused therapeutic methods.
- When some experience leads to overwhelm or shut down, my priority is to bring you to a state of sense of safety in the consulting room with me.
- We work collaboratively with every experience you present, reflecting on the process.
- Together, we identify what is important to follow up on.
- In some cases, we can identify whether Eye Movement Desensitising and Reprocessing would be a good resource to process some less accessible or blocked experiences.
An overview of 60-minute session long:
Beginning with a check-in: Noticing where you are internally.
Development towards processing of experience: counselling and therapy
Process reflection at the end of the session: Noticing where you might have arrived by the end of the session.
The first 10 minutes and the last 10 minutes are also very important.
Training, qualifications & experience
Most relevant therapeutic trainings and qualifications:
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitising and Reprocessing), with Dr. Sandi Richman
- Emotion-Focused Therapy for Complex Trauma, with Dr. Sandra Paivio
- Emotion-Focused Therapy for Individuals (Adults), with Dr. Robert Elliot and Dr. Lesley Greenberg
- Masters in Counselling (Person Centred and Psychodynamic), University of Edinburgh
Current Private Practice and previous experience:
I give consultations in my quiet, private consulting room in Edinburgh West End. I can see you in person and on Zoom, as it is most convenient to you.
Previous Services where I practised as a counselling therapist:
- Pastoral Foundation (PF)
- Edinburgh Rape Crices Centre (ERCC)
- CRUSE Bereavement Support
- Place2Be
Member organisations
school Registered / Accredited
Being registered/accredited with a professional body means an individual must have achieved a substantial level of training and experience approved by their member organisation.
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
Photos & videos
Fees
£70.00 per session
Free initial online session
Additional information
I may offer concessions to clients who I have clear confirmation they could not access private therapy fees otherwise.
When I work
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On Mondays, the last session ends at 4:30pm.
On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays I see clients in person and online, and my last session ends at 5:15pm.
