About Me
I will always bring my true, authentic self to my practice, my clients, and my practitioners.
Where my work began…
My focus on interpersonal trauma began years ago, when I was working as a nurse on a women’s acute psychiatric ward. I still remember the moment my world tilted on its axis. An older Welsh nurse, someone who had seen a great deal in her time, turned to me and said simply, “Most of these women are in here because they were abused.”
That was it. I could no longer see only the illness. I began to notice how easily the system could turn away from the truth by naming these women as sick, and how rarely anyone stopped to ask what had actually happened to them. The insight was so clear that I felt painfully at odds with the gendered view of the world I saw playing out around me.
It was also the beginning of my own journey. I started to recognise how I had been shaped by the same misogynistic beliefs that affect all of us, men included, and how many of my own symptoms, anxiety among them, traced back to unsupportive relationships in my early years and to difficult experiences in my teens. From that time on, this understanding has been my guiding principle.
The body is a vital source of truth
Mainstream psychology has long privileged the mind over the body, as if our thoughts float around untethered from the physical container that holds them. For decades, the body was treated as secondary, or worse, irrelevant. But the body has always been speaking.
As a woman, and as a practitioner, I've spent my life reclaiming the body, particularly women's bodies, as a vital source of truth, intuition, and deep knowing. It's heartening to finally see the world catching up to what so many of us have felt all along: that our physical experience is not an afterthought, but central to our full wellbeing.
The sensations still arrived, but as I came to understand my triggers, they began to soften. My body had been asking me to ease the stress I was carrying, so my life changed. I faced the parts that were provoking my anxiety, including relationships and work that were no longer serving me.
Even now a symptom surfaces from time to time, and I treat it as a message, an invitation to pause and work out what I need. I am grateful that my body gives me such honest feedback.
Mindfulness has been part of my own path for many years, including several years of mindful self-compassion grounded in Buddhist practice. I’m a meditation teacher as well as a psychologist, and the way I work with mindfulness is secular and grounded in the research, the same research that has given us a clear window into how these practices change the brain. In my daily work, I have the joy of watching people soften towards their symptoms and grow curious about them, rather than fighting a battle they cannot win. That softening is so often the first step out of old, repeating patterns and into a life that feels more open, more comfortable, and more their own.
Listening to our bodies
I learned this first in my own body, long before I read it in any textbook. I have used mindfulness since the mid-1980s, when I first went looking for help with my own anxiety and panic. I share it because there is real value in being open. When a practitioner is willing to say “I have been there too,” it can land in a way that helps. It is a reminder that I am human, and that I have walked through hard things myself.
I remember it clearly. I was driving my children to pre-school when my body suddenly turned on me: shortness of breath, a tight chest, a dizziness that forced me to pull over at the side of the road. The feeling passed, and it was the first of many.
One day I decided to watch myself have an episode, standing at the long mirror outside my mother’s bedroom. My counsellor had encouraged me to let the feeling move through me, and I was curious to see what it actually looked like. I breathed steadily as the wave rose and faded, white noise ringing in my ears, my heart pounding, my breath short. That was the day I stopped being afraid. I felt almost elated. I had watched the whole thing happen, and I had come through it. Curiosity had taken the place of fear.
Taking the first step can feel like a lot. When you’re ready, I’d be glad to hear from you. We can start gently, at your own pace, and find out together whether working with me feels right for you. There’s no need to have it all worked out before we talk.
From power over to power with
I feel part of a movement that has reframed how we understand trauma. Rather than treating distress as something faulty inside a person, this approach looks at the bigger picture: the imbalances of power we live within, the way those imbalances so often fall along gendered lines, and what becomes possible when we move from holding power over another person to sharing power with them.
My thinking has been shaped by the practitioners who pioneered this work, often controversially, from the 1980s onward. People like Bessel van der Kolk, Janina Fisher, Judith Herman and Pat Ogden, among many others. More recently, polyvagal theory and neuropsychology have given us a language for the body, a way of understanding how the nervous system responds to the world and what those responses are trying to tell us.
Post-traumatic stress sits at the centre of my work. Over the years I’ve come to believe that a great deal of what we label as mental illness makes far more sense when we understand it through the lens of trauma, and when we’re honest about the conditions people have lived through. How children are raised, and how often harm goes unspoken inside the very institutions meant to care for us. That conviction shapes how I sit with every person who comes to see me.
To read more about PTSD visit Bessel Vand der Kolk article.
My role as mentor to practitioners
One of my early realisations in this field was just how inadequate traditional training can be when it comes to self-knowledge. Many of our university programs placed little emphasis on the importance of therapists seeking their own therapy. Yet experiencing the client’s chair is an essential part of becoming a partner in the healing process. Attachment-based and somatic approaches have long recognised this, requiring students to engage experientially, to sit in the discomfort, to feel their own responses, to notice what arises in the nervous system.
This kind of training doesn’t just make you a better therapist; it protects you from burnout. When we’re more attuned to what’s happening inside ourselves, we’re far less likely to fear our “gnarly bits” and our clients’.
Why I chose somatic as a foundation
My foundation was in somatic psychotherapy, and it shaped everything that followed. I learned early on how deeply our beliefs, histories, and unspoken loyalties lodge themselves in the body. These patterns can weave through the nervous system in ways that impact us across identity, relationships, and lived experience. Understanding this has given me a deep respect for the body’s role in healing and a clear-eyed appreciation for how complex our inner world truly is.
I also know how many therapists struggle with the idea of seeking therapy themselves. Many feel it signals failure or a lack of competence, because that’s what the system taught us. I feel enormous compassion for practitioners who were never given permission to be vulnerable. The truth is that real self-compassion, the kind we hope our clients will someday feel, only grows when we’re willing to own and honour our own tender spots. No one escapes childhood unscathed. No one makes it into adulthood without carrying something.
The training behind the work
Everything I’ve shared here rests on many years of formal training and practice. I’m a Senior Counselling Psychologist registered with AHPRA, a member of the Australian Psychological Society, and a Fellow of the College of Counselling Psychologists. My work draws on specialised training in trauma, schema therapy, EMDR and body-based approaches, built over more than thirty years.
If you’d like the full picture of my registration, qualifications and the modalities I work with, you’ll find it all on one page.