Clinical Services

---

I specialise in safe and effective psychological therapy to support recovery and rehabilitation following accidents, injury or illness. My aim is to help people return to work or resume their lives as quickly and as fully as possible. I work with people who self-refer, as well as clients referred to me by private medical insurers, private mental health care providers, and rehabilitation specialists.

I undertake comprehensive psychological assessments to develop a clearer understanding of an individual's circumstances, provide a psychological perspective on current difficulties and recovery, and to help people identify the most suitable therapy for their circumstances. Assessment appointments are sixty minutes and involve informal discussions as well as the use of standardised psychological measures to inform the assessment process. As a seasoned professional psychologist, I can help you to decide on the most appropriate route to recovery.

I have extensive training and clinical expertise in a range of evidence-based psychological therapies, honed over years of practice in the NHS and the independent sector. I offer Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, Compassion Focussed Therapy (CFT), Schema Therapy (ST) and several other approaches. Psychological therapy sessions are between fifty and sixty minutes long. Sessions using trauma-focused CBT or EMDR while working directly on trauma memories can be longer.

The global pandemic dramatically affected working practices across the whole of society including in the health care sector. During the pandemic I experienced a sudden shift from face-to-face appointments, to working entirely remotely with clients using online therapy platforms for the first time in my career. In addition to highlighting the added convenience of online therapy, this experience clearly demonstrated that online therapy is just as effective as face-to-face treatment, and for some people it may be preferable. Although I am based in Lancaster, I now work entirely online using a secure video call platform with end-to-end encryption to protect people's privacy. I work from a private office at home where your privacy is also protected.

CBT is a talking therapy for managing difficulties by changing the way we think and behave. It's suitable for a wide range of problems. CBT is based on the central idea that our thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and actions are all connected, and automatic thoughts as well as self-protective behaviours can inadvertently trap us in vicious cycle of distress. CBT aims to help us deal with these problems in a positive way by breaking them down into smaller and more manageable parts, and giving us tools to change our thinking and behaviour to improve our situation. CBT helps us look for practical ways to improve our state of mind in our everyday life.

EMDR is a talking therapy that was developed to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but now has a wide range of applications. People with PTSD may experience intrusive thoughts, emotions, nightmares and other disturbing impressions of traumatic events from their past. EMDR helps the brain reprocess these impressions of a traumatic event so the images, emotions and physical feelings they cause have less impact. EMDR can be a challenging yet powerful therapy, so it's important to have a good support network of family or friends around you.

Compassion Focussed Therapy (CFT) is a relatively new talking therapy that was developed for chronic problems involving feelings of shame and self-loathing. CFT uses a contemporary understanding of the brain to help us appreciate the biological basis of distressing states of mind, and to recognise these as human responses to specific circumstances that all people share. CFT also teaches a range of imagery, body-based and behavioural strategies for soothing distress, feeling safer and relieving shame.

Schema Therapy aims to help people gain deeper insight into their difficulties so they can manage negative emotions, reduce avoidance in life, improve the quality of their relationships, change thinking and develop better life skills. Schema therapy may be more suited to people with long term problems who’ve had painful or adverse childhood experiences. As well as drawing from conventional CBT theory and practice, Schema Therapy puts a strong emphasis on the therapist-client relationship and uses this to meet some of the client's emotional needs in a way that supports change.