Individual therapy

Most people who contact us have been sitting with something for a while. It might be anxiety that colours everything, a low mood that won't shift, or relationships that keep breaking down in ways that feel painfully familiar. Sometimes there is a clear trigger: a bereavement, a breakup, a moment of crisis. Other times it is quieter than that, just a persistent feeling that something is not right.

We work with people dealing with depression, anxiety, anger, shame, difficulties with intimacy, and patterns of behaviour they recognise but cannot seem to change. Some of our clients have been through other forms of therapy before and found them helpful up to a point, but not deep enough. Others are coming to therapy for the first time.

You do not need a diagnosis or a dramatic reason to begin. If something in your life keeps not working, if you find yourself reacting in ways you do not fully understand, or if you are carrying something you have never been able to talk about openly, those are all good enough reasons.

Our therapists offer psychotherapy rooted in a psychodynamic tradition, which means we are interested in the whole of you, not just the presenting problem.

Sessions last 50 minutes and take place at the same time each week. That regularity matters. It creates a frame around the work, a space you can rely on being there.

Inside that space, we follow what is alive for you. Your therapist will listen carefully, but they will also notice things you might not be aware of: shifts in your tone, subjects you circle around, feelings that surface and then quickly disappear. Sometimes they will name what they see. Sometimes they will stay quiet and let something develop.

We also pay close attention to what happens between you and your therapist in the room itself. The way you relate to your therapist often reflects the way you relate to other people in your life. If you notice yourself holding back, trying to perform, or worrying about being too much, that is not a problem. It is exactly what we are here to look at together.

Over time, you begin to understand not just what you do but why you do it. You start to see where certain patterns come from and what they were originally designed to protect you from. That understanding is what makes lasting change possible.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is built on a simple but difficult question: why do you keep doing things that are not working for you? Rather than offering techniques to manage symptoms, we are interested in the deeper patterns that produce those symptoms in the first place. The defences you developed early in life, the ways of relating that once kept you safe but now keep you stuck, the feelings you learned to suppress long before you had words for them.

This is not a skills-based approach. We do not set homework or work through structured exercises. Instead, we create the conditions for you to encounter parts of yourself that have been kept out of view, sometimes for decades. That process can be uncomfortable, but it is where real change begins.

Many of our clients have tried other forms of counselling and found them useful but incomplete. Psychodynamic work goes further because it addresses what is driving the difficulty, not just the difficulty itself. The changes that come from this kind of therapy tend to last because they are built on genuine self-understanding, not strategies that require constant upkeep.

Progress is not dramatic. You will not wake up transformed. But over weeks and months, you will start to notice shifts. Conversations that used to derail will go differently. Reactions that were automatic will develop a pause in them. You will feel less at the mercy of your own patterns and more able to choose how you respond to the people and situations around you.