About me
[I now only have online slots on Mondays, and in-person sessions one evening a week. Please message me for availability.]
Hi there. I'm warm and down-to-earth in how I show up as your therapist. I want our therapy sessions to feel like a real conversation between two people rather than one where you're positioned as the one with the problem and I'm the distant and formal expert. I've worked for over 6 years in both the NHS and private settings and people and clients often tell me they find me easy to talk to, and I think that comes from a fairly natural way of meeting people on their level, without jargon or unnecessary distance.
While we go deep in our sessions, I will quite happily wheel out a cheesy pun or bad joke when it feels appropriate in the room. This is a feature of my personality of course but also about creating safety and helping things feel more human and tolerable when emotions are intense and confusing, and can make space for something that otherwise feels too heavy or too sharp to look at directly. I think at the centre of it all I believe that therapy should feel both safe and real: a place where you can speak freely, feel met as a person by someone who isn't some remote, distant figure and begin to relate to yourself with more understanding.
My interests in therapy:
I'm interested in how we navigate and make sense of our identities during difficult life transitions, when things haven't worked out the way we thought they would, particularly when there is a gap between how life looks on the outside and how it feels internally. I'm also interested in people navigating their own expectations of themselves as well as family expectations and wider cultural pressures.
My approach:
My approach is influenced mostly by humanistic and psychodynamic ideas, which means being person-centred and curious with you about conflicted feelings and deeper patterns that feel like they’re constantly being repeated or feel difficult to shift. Working in this way means paying attention to what happens between us in the room as well, as I find this can often reflect longer-standing experiences in our early relationships.
Books that have been really formative for me have been James Hollis' The Middle Passage and Irvin Yalom's Staring at the Sun and Love's Executioner, and these influence my therapy approach a lot. I feel like a lot of our struggles come from a deep knowing of certain existential truths that we spend a lifetime grappling and making sense of, and that the second half of life is about asking deeper questions of ourselves to move beyond what we had to construct in the first half of our lives to survive.
Me beyond being a therapist:
I grew up in Devon and am now based in London. I worked in public polling companies for 7 years before pivoting back to psychology which has been the best decision of my life as I've had the honour of meeting dozens of amazing people as my clients - each and every one of whom I will never forget and still do think about.
I've had a long therapy journey of my own through as someone navigating love, life, work, existential dread and everything in between as a South Asian diaspora woman in the UK. Therapy has helped me immensely in learning that a lot of the way I navigated life for a very long time was from a place of hypervigilance and deep emotional truths that just seemed like laws of the universe before I really started looking at them. I've always been quite self-aware but actually working with a therapist where I felt relationally tested (and exposed!) has been the most transformative thing for me.
In my spare time beyond spending time with loved ones, I love exploring London museums and culture, being creative, painting and making things with clay. I've always loved learning languages and am currently obsessed with swimming. I'm still a terrible swimmer but the water really is my happy place, so it's OK.
Who you might be
My clients tend to be thoughtful and self-aware, frustrated that understanding themselves hasn’t been enough to change how things feel or keep unfolding. You might be struggling with:
- Feeling low, anxious, or emotionally overwhelmed in ways that don’t totally make sense to you
- A sense of emptiness or disconnection from yourself, from others, or from your life
- Relationships that follow difficult patterns you can see clearly but can’t seem to break
- Burnout, perfectionism, or a feeling that you’re performing a version of yourself rather than living as yourself
- Questions about identity, belonging, or your relationship with culture, faith, or family expectations
- Grief, bereavement and loss
- Life transitions that have left you unsteady
What sessions are like
Starting therapy: After you contact me, I will invite you for a 15-30 minute introductory call to get a sense of what brings you to therapy. You can often get a sense from this call as to whether you feel safe and comfortable talking to me. If you're still happy to go ahead with the assessment session, I will send across the assessment questionnaire and therapy agreement for you to look at. I ask all clients to fill out the assessment questionnaire before our first assessment session, and the therapy agreement by session 2 so we're both on the same page as we begin.
During therapy: I am led by you in our sessions. This means we usually start by checking in with what feels most important for you in the moment, or what has stayed with you since our last session. I'll usually speak about what has stayed with me from our last session too. Sometimes there’s something specific you want to talk through, and other times it might feel less clear, and we spend a bit of time getting a sense of what’s been going on for you.
This might involve making sense of a current difficulty, noticing patterns in how you’re feeling or relating to others, or going back to earlier experiences that feel connected to what’s happening now. Sometimes it might involve learning a new skill to manage overwhelming emotions or behaviours you want to change.
We don’t rush to fix things, and there’s no pressure to have everything neatly worked out to talk about. The focus is more on understanding what’s going on for you in a way that feels safe, steady and manageable.
We also pay attention to what it feels like to be in the room together. Sometimes how you experience the session, or what it’s like talking to me, can give us useful clues about how things tend to feel in other relationships too. If that feels helpful, we might gently bring that into the conversation and explore it together.
I think it's important that you don’t feel like you have to present yourself in a certain way. People often use sessions to say things they’ve been holding onto, or to think out loud about things that feel confusing or uncomfortable. We make space for that, and we go at a pace that feels right for you.
Over time, sessions often help difficult emotions and experiences feel more understandable and less stuck. The aim is that you start to feel a bit more clarity about yourself and your patterns, and more able to relate to yourself and others in a way that feels more flexible and grounded in values that feel authentically yours.
Training, qualifications & experience
My training has followed the scientist-practitioner model, meaning that I am trained to work therapeutically while thinking about and referring to the research literature and evidence base around how your struggles affect you. What this means for you is that I'm drawing on more than just my own intuition and experience when we are working together and am usually also drawing on the current wider research literature.
Teaching, training and research
I have taught and led seminars around clinical practice at undergraduate and postgraduate level in psychology and psychotherapy. I am also currently a clinical stakeholder in a pioneering project creating a benchmark to assess the therapeutic safety of AI, as well as working on a large scale research project investigating the impact of shunning in religious communities.
Qualifications
- BSc Psychology, Brunel University. This was my foundation in human psychology covering biological, cognitive, developmental and social psychology as well as personality psychology.
- MSc Clinical Associate in Psychology, University College London (UCL). This was a clinical psychology training to work with complex adult mental health difficulties in NHS community services, covering CBT and third wave behavioural models. Accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS).
- MSc Counselling Psychology, University of Roehampton. This was an in depth therapeutic and research training covering humanistic therapies including person-centred, existential and Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT).
- PsychD Doctorate in Counselling Psychology (pending 2027), University of Roehampton. This is an advanced, doctoral level therapeutic and research training covering humanistic, psychodynamic and CBT and third wave behavioural therapeutic models in order to practice as Counselling Psychologist, a title which is legally protected in the UK, accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS) and regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC).
Other relevant certifications
- Certificate in Therapeutic Skills, Metanoia Institute. Foundational therapeutic training in counselling skills.
- Intensive Training Certificate in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, British Isles DBT. I am qualified to carry out 1:1 and group DBT within a DBT service with clients who are suicidal and self-harming.
- Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination (ACE-III). Training to assess for cognitive impairment in adults and older adults.
- BACP Certificate of Proficiency. This confirmed that I meet the standards necessary to register with the BACP.
Clinical experience
I have six years of clinical experience across the NHS in Talking Therapies (IAPT), community mental health teams, and specialist mental health rehabilitation services, working with adults and older adults across a wide range of presentations including complex trauma, severe mood and anxiety difficulties, psychosis, and complex relational and emotional needs including personality disorders, suicidality and self-harm. I also have experience in private therapy settings and with young people in a school setting.
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
Other areas of counselling I deal with
As a British South Asian therapist, I pay particular attention to the ways wider cultural, religious and systemic factors may play into your current situation as well as how the relationship between us unfolds, and this is something we can explore as much or as little as you want to.
I also work with LGBTQ+ clients of a religious or ethnic minority background who want to explore navigate this with their culture or faith in mind.
I also work with people leaving religious communities and those affected by religious shunning.
Therapies offered
Photos & videos
Fees
£85.00 - £100.00
Concessions offered for
Additional information
Free initial conversation.
Initial assessment £60 whether online or in person.
Online sessions are £85.
In-person sessions are £100 based at the lovely Homa Therapy Rooms in Clerkenwell, Islington.
I offer concessionary spots for those in financial hardship - please contact me to discuss.
When I work
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Currently taking requests for evening in-person sessions only. Please message me for availability.
