If you are confronting unexpected hardships, personal shifts, unfulfilled potential, or questions about life, I offer a secure space to heal, learn, and grow. As an internationally accredited psychologist and integrative therapist, I combine a broad toolkit of psychological approaches to fit your unique needs. Together, we will blend world-leading scientific expertise with authentic human connection, transforming your challenges into a structured, meaningful path forward.
Why go to a therapist, coach, or counsellor?
Most people do not seek therapy or coaching simply to get rid of a medical diagnosis. They reach out because they want to learn how to live a meaningful, fulfilling life in spite of the challenges they face. You may want to ask for psychotherapy or coaching if you are facing:
Questions about meaning or purpose
Feeling an overwhelming sense of existential emptiness, pointlessness, or confusion about your ultimate purpose in life.
Transition moments & boundary moments in life
Navigating profound life shifts—such as retirement, career change, aging, empty-nest syndrome, or the sudden confrontation with our own human vulnerability and mortality. Life constantly tests our resilience through unexpected shifts, transitions, and mental fatigue. For example, you may be navigating massive, destabilizing personal shifts such as sudden career transitions, retirement, identity changes, or deep grief and loss.
A chronic or life-threatening disease
Managing the psychological shock, grief, or lifestyle changes that come with a medical diagnosis like cancer, heart conditions, or chronic pain.
Societal or political stress
Feeling deeply anxious, exhausted, or overwhelmed by the rising polarization, extremism, and systemic crises in the world around you. Wondering how you can live a meaningful life, and contribute to making the world a better place, without extremism or violence.
Burnout, work dissatisfaction, or not fulfilling your potential
Feeling trapped in unfulfilling corporate work, suffering from professional burnout, or wanting to realign your business leadership with your core values.
Navigating LGBTQIA2+ Identity
Wanting to live an authentic, proud, and satisfying life within a society that can still feel profoundly hostile, exclusionary, and discriminatory.
A religious journey or spiritual crisis
Exploring deep existential or theological doubts, finding renewed meaning and purpose in your vocation, and balancing the rigorous demands of pastoral care. Coping with intense spiritual doubts, institutional betrayal, vocational isolation, or doctrinal conflicts, particularly if you serve as a priest, minister, or faith leader.
Painful memories or mental health problems
Managing continuous hurdles with anxiety, depression, past trauma, or recurring mood changes.
How do I work?
My practice is grounded in our authentic connection and my scientific expertise about what works for which questions in which clients. Here are some ways of how we could work together:
Follow Your Aims
We will start by exploring what you would like to achieve through therapy or coaching. Sometimes you may not know exactly what you want to achieve at the start, or your goals may become clearer over time. It could also be that there are underlying reasons that you may not be aware of yet. We will regularly check in to ensure our sessions are actively helping you achieve these aims.
Assessment: Understanding Your Story
This is a personalized process about you: your questions, problems, unique strengths, and life lessons in resilience.We examine how society, your social network, or your current personal life situation may have impacted you.The goal is to uncover the underlying, key cause of your struggles, which is often not what you initially think it is.This phase can be relatively short through casual conversations, or a full, systematic diagnostic process using validated questionnaires, completely tailored to your needs.
Choosing the Best Method Together
Based on your specific aims and our assessment, we will actively look for the best possible therapeutic method.We decide this together as collaborative partners.I will share my broad toolkit of possible methods with you, which includes CBT, existential therapy, meaning-centered therapy, transactional analysis psychotherapy, and diversity-affirming practices.
Sharing Knowledge and Skills (Discussions & Psychoeducation)
I share my psychological tools with you as an equal.I strongly believe in empowering clients, sitting right next to you rather than treating you from a distance.My job is simply to hand you the tools I have learned, helping you become highly skilled at using them independently.
Building a Secure Relationship
The professional relationship is arguably one of the most vital ingredients for successful therapy or coaching. It requires a true click, a human connection, and a deep feeling of safety. This space acts as a testing ground where you can try out new ideas and safely express thoughts you may have never said out loud before.
Helping You Take Responsibility
My ultimate aim is to help you develop the knowledge, independence, and skills required to navigate life and flourish entirely without my help. I want to ensure you leave therapy knowing exactly who you are and where to find further resources if needed.
Utilizing Cognitive Techniques
I often use cognitive techniques and structural explanations in our sessions.This helps you clearly identify, dissect, and challenge patterns in your thinking that are unhelpful, unrealistic, or keeping you stuck.
Practicing Experiential Techniques
I frequently integrate experiential techniques, such as mindfulness, into our workflow.These practices help you drop out of your head, connect with your body, and safely explore deeper emotional patterns.
Exploring Transactions and Relationships
We will often explore how your current struggles relate directly to the relationships and transactions with people in your life right now.We also look at how you may have internalized past relationship dynamics and childhood transactions, and how they still dictate your behavior today.
Working with Internal Parts & Traumatic Memories
I often work with distinct "parts" of the self, especially when dealing with trauma or grief. If there are painful memories or parts of yourself you avoid, we do not necessarily need to dive into the trauma itself. Instead, we can learn how to acknowledge, soothe, and work with that part so it stops disturbing your daily life.
Cultivating Existential Self-Compassion
I find self-compassion to be absolutely key to healing.In our sessions, we will focus particularly on existential self-compassion, giving you grace as you navigate your deepest, most difficult life questions.
Aligning Life with Authentic Meaning
Everything we do is driven by helping you align your daily actions with your core meanings in life in a way that feels authentically and intuitively meaningful. I will invite you to explore what your inner intuitions say is authentically meaningful. Global research consistently shows that this deep, critical exploration is precisely what helps people live a more meaningful life.
Committing to Social Justice
I have a strong, foundational sense of social justice.Our personal, internal struggles are very often caused or worsened by broader societal struggles, discrimination, and systemic pressures.Our approach will be highly realistic: we will not resort to false blame or victimization, but we will look honestly at real threats, limitations, resources, and opportunities so you can take powerful action within your actual situation.
About terminology
As an accredited psychologist with the British Psychological Society (BPS), I am fully qualified to offer a wide range of services, including psychotherapy, psychological interventions, counselling, coaching, and training. To me, the specific term or label we use does not matter. What matters is that our approach fits your unique needs, goals, and personal strengths. However, it may be helpful to understand the essential differences between these paths:
· Psychotherapy: Focuses on deep, exploratory work to examine long-standing psychological patterns, identity questions, internalized trauma, or existential crises.
· Psychological Interventions: Uses targeted, evidence-based clinical techniques (like CBT protocols or diagnostic frameworks) to treat specific mental health conditions or symptoms.
· Counselling: Provides a supportive, safe space to process immediate life stressors, heavy emotions, relationship difficulties, or short-term grief.
· Coaching: Concentrates on your future, helping you unlock your potential, achieve specific professional or personal goals, and manage career transitions.
· Training: Offers structured skill-building and education to help you master specific psychological tools, leadership practices, or resilience techniques.
Practicalities
· Session length: Sessions last between 60 and 90 minutes.
· Online: Most clients prefer to meet online, via a link I send them at the start of the meeting for Microsoft Teams or Zoom.
· On location: Some clients prefer to meet in person. I can easily travel in and around Reading (UK) to visit people at home or in their office.
· Fees for a session: 110GBP for self-paying, waged clients; 60GBP for self-paying, unwaged clients; 150GBP for employees whose employer pays for sessions; 300GBP for commercial business and leadership coaching. Please contact me for reduced and alternative fees.
· Fees for full psychological assessment and report: starting at 600GBP, depending on the purpose.
Why choose me?
While I bring world-leading expertise to our sessions, I treat our work as a deeply personal, authentic, and human collaboration where you remain the expert on your own inner self. My clinical approach is shaped by pioneering innovations that have been recognized with some of the biggest global accolades in the field:
· Professional Registrations: I am a fully accredited Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) and hold the distinction of Associate Fellow with the British Psychological Society (BPS), reflecting a long-term contribution to high-standard psychological practice and clinical science.
· Psychodiagnostic & Assessment Expertise: I have undertaken extensive, specialised training in comprehensive psychological evaluations, holding the formal Basisaantekening Psychodiagnostiek (Basic Psychodiagnostics Qualification) from the Dutch Association of Psychologists (NIP) in the Netherlands. This allows me to unpack complex, layered problems with clinical precision.
· Broad Expertise: My practice is built on a diverse range of intensive therapeutic certifications, such as cognitive behaviour therapy, Transactional Analysis, existential, meaning-centred, group, trauma-focused, narrative, and contextual family therapies. This broad toolkit can help us tailor a highly flexible, bespoke plan.
· Award-winning Innovative Practice: I search together with my clients to find solutions that works for them, even when there does not seem to be any hope or previous treatments did not work. This follows from innovative approach, as I am always looking to developing and validating better ways to help clients. For instance, I have systematically developed, researched, and published various new psychological interventions and treatments, and trained thousands of therapists. This led to thousands of successfully treated clients, as evidenced by multi-awarded systematic research studies on my interventions (e.g., see my 'ABOUT' website page).
· Authentic Human: Like all humans, I am on a personal life journey to find my way to a meaningful and satisfying life in a world that all too often brings unexpected challenges, turns, and roadblocks. This brings me a deep understanding and empathy for the struggles and tragedies of my clients, as well as a defiant optimism. For it is in the deepest darkness of human suffering that I have found an inextinguishable light—a place where we can kindle the unique spark of our meaning, casting a glow of hope across our path forward. In the warmth of this shared light, we will work side by side, translating these poetic truths into real, everyday steps toward your healing.
Because everybody deserves a meaningful life. And so do you.
Have a question or want to see if we are a good fit? Reach out for a casual, no-obligation chat.