Things people often ask

Individual psychotherapy is £90 per session, couple's therapy £120, and psychotherapeutic coaching is tailored based on duration of the work.

Most people who ask this question are already ready. The fact that you're considering it, that something has brought you to this page, is usually enough. You don't need to be in crisis. You don't need a clear agenda or the right words. You just need a degree of curiosity about yourself and a willingness to show up. The rest can be figured out together.

The first session is a conversation, not an assessment. You'll have space to say something about what brought you here, and we'll have a chance to get a sense of each other. There's no pressure to go anywhere you're not ready to go.

We'll also cover some practical ground: how we work, what to expect, confidentiality. By the end you should have a clearer sense of whether this feels like the right fit. We'll take it from there.

There's no single answer to this, and anyone who gives you one early on is guessing. It depends on what you're bringing, what you're hoping for, and what unfolds in the work.

Some people come for a focused piece of shorter-term work: 12 to 20 sessions with a clear thread running through. Others find that what they thought was one thing opens into something larger, and the work deepens over a longer period. We typically review as we go, so you're never locked in and never left without a sense of where things stand.

Yes. I offer a free 20-minute introductory call before any commitment is made. It's a chance to ask questions, get a feel for how we work, and begin to sense whether this might be the right fit. There's no obligation on either side.

I ask for 7 days notice for cancellations. Sessions cancelled with less notice than this are charged in full. I know life is unpredictable and I hold this with as much flexibility as I reasonably can, but the session time is held for you and late cancellations are difficult to fill at short notice.

Both are available. I work with clients from my East London studio and online via a secure video platform. Many clients do a mix of both depending on the week.

Online therapy works well for most people and most presenting concerns. If there's a specific reason why in-person work might be more appropriate for you, we'll say so.

Core Process Psychotherapy (CPP) is a mindfulness-based, relational approach that draws on both Western psychology and Buddhist understandings of the mind. It was developed at the Karuna Institute in Devon, where I trained.

What makes it distinctive is its starting premise: that beneath even our most painful or entrenched experiences, there is something whole in us. Something that hasn't been damaged by what we've been through. The work isn't about fixing what's broken. It's about bringing honest, present-moment attention to your experience, and discovering what becomes possible when you do.

In practice this means we work with what's alive right now: what you notice in your body, your feelings, your patterns of relating, not just the story of what happened. The relationship between therapist and client is central. How you are with me, and how I am with you, is itself part of the work.

This isn't at all an unusual experience. Therapy that doesn't fit can be unhelpful, or worse, and the reasons previous attempts didn't stick are worth understanding if we can.

Sometimes it's the approach: a more directive or structured model that didn't leave enough room. Sometimes it's the relationship: the therapist was technically competent but something in the connection was off. Sometimes the timing wasn't right, or the work touched something that needed more support than was available.

I can't promise a different outcome, but I can promise to take the question seriously. If you've had an experience that didn't work, telling me about it is one of the most useful things you can bring to an initial conversation.

Most coaching focuses on performance: how to execute more effectively, set better goals, overcome resistance. That's sometimes exactly what's needed.

Psychotherapeutic coaching starts from a different place. It's interested not just in what you want to achieve, but in understanding the patterns, conditioning and relational history that shape how you show up at work. Where those patterns are working for you, and where they're getting in the way.

The difference in practice is this: where a conventional coach might help you push through resistance, I'd be more likely to get curious about it. The resistance often knows something worth hearing.

It's also a space where you can question the goal itself. Not every obstacle is a problem to be solved. Sometimes the most useful thing is to figure out whether you actually want what you think you want.

The boundary between them is less fixed than it might appear, and for most people the question resolves itself fairly quickly once the work begins.

As a rough guide: if what you're bringing feels primarily rooted in your professional life, your working identity, your ambitions and the patterns that complicate them, coaching is probably the right starting point. If it feels more personal, more rooted in your history, your relationships, your sense of self beyond work, therapy is likely the better frame.

Often the two are connected. We'll follow what's most alive and most useful, and the container can shift if it needs to.

My foundation is my training at the Karuna Institute in Core Process Psychotherapy: a mindfulness-based, relational approach that holds both the Western therapeutic tradition and Buddhist philosophy in dialogue, working with the whole person and with the quality of presence between therapist and client. That grounding has never left me. Beyond it, three thinkers have most shaped my approach.

Bruce Tift holds in tension two things therapy can treat as opposites: that our past has shaped us, and the Buddhist insight that the freedom we are looking for is already available in this moment, if we can bear to be present in it. What stays with me is his idea that our defences are ultimately ways of avoiding vulnerability, and that real change comes not from eliminating it but from being willing to meet it.

Irvin Yalom, the existential psychiatrist, speaks to something I encounter again and again: that what heals is not technique or interpretation, but the quality of the encounter itself. He sees real change as the movement from “this happened to me” to “what choices am I making now?”, a shift from being the object of your own story to becoming its subject.

James Hollis, the Jungian analyst, names the gap between the life we are living and the life that is actually asking to be lived. He is unflinching about how much of what we want from others is really a search for something we can only find within ourselves, and how much freedom opens up when we take responsibility for our own inner life.

All three, in their different ways, return to the same invitation: to stop living reflexively and start living deliberately. To ask not just what has happened to us, but what our life is asking of us now. That question sits at the heart of the work.

Sometimes, yes. Not always, and not in a way that should feel unmanageable, but I often mention the possibility of this as we start work together.

When you start paying closer attention to your inner life, things that were out of view come into view. Feelings that were held at a distance become more present. Old patterns, once named, can feel more obvious and briefly more uncomfortable before they begin to shift.

If things feel harder, tell me. That's information, not a sign something has gone wrong. The work should have challenge in it, but it should never feel like more than you can hold. Pacing matters, and it's something I attend to carefully.

This is one of the questions I am asked most often, and it is a good one. Progress in therapy is not always loud or obvious. One of the most reliable signs I have noticed, both in my own experience and in my work with clients, is a growing sense of agency: a feeling of being more in the driver's seat of your own life.

When therapy is working, people begin to move, often gradually, sometimes imperceptibly at first, from a sense that life is simply happening to them, towards a feeling that they have choices. That they are the authors of their own story, not just its subject. This shift shows up in different ways for different people: a relationship that feels less stuck, a decision that had seemed impossible suddenly feeling within reach, a sense of being more alive to their own life.

The existential psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, whose thinking has profoundly influenced me, describes this as the movement from “this happened to me” to “what choices am I making now?” In his view, and in mine, we almost always have more freedom and responsibility than we allow ourselves to feel. Therapy, at its best, helps us reconnect with that.

It is worth saying too that progress is rarely linear. There will be sessions that feel significant and others that feel like nothing much happened, and sometimes it is those sessions that turn out to matter most. What I tend to look for, over time, is that sense of expanding agency. When a client begins to feel more like themselves, more capable of shaping their life and their relationships, something real is happening.

Yes, with a small number of exceptions required by law. What you share in sessions stays between us.

The exceptions are the same across all regulated therapy practice in the UK: if I had serious concern that you or someone else was at risk of significant harm, I would discuss that with you directly and, if necessary, take appropriate steps. This is rare, and I would always aim to involve you in that process rather than act without your knowledge.

For coaching clients with concerns about professional confidentiality: nothing is shared with employers, colleagues or anyone else. The work is entirely private.