Psychotherapist and Counsellor (BSc, PgDip (WPF), FPC, UKCP) working in Central London and Online.

Hello, I am an experienced, registered psychotherapist and counsellor working full time in private practice in Hackney within easy reach of the City and Central London, Islington and Shoreditch. I also offer Online therapy or sessions over the phone and am registered with AXA and Aviva insurance . I teach Psychotherapy at the Caspari Institute for Educational Psychotherapy and I have long experience of working in corporate environments at many levels.

Psychotherapy has a long history, many competing brands and has been revalued and devalued with each generation and cultural shift so here’s my take on what it is and how it works:

• It’s a conversation where the way you feel about things (your subjective experience) is the main focus of interest.
• By listening to and validating your experience and point of view in a consistent environment I hope we will build a good, trusting relationship. This can allow more difficult experiences to surface, to be acknowledged and thought about.
• Often current experiences and emotional states (eg struggles with authority at work or anxiety about health) have a precedent in past environments and relationships such as family and school. As a therapist I listen for apparent repetitions of these kinds of patterns and reflect them back for consideration. If they have a sense of truth for you this can lead to a wider consideration of how earlier learnt behaviours that were necessary positions for a dependent child can have limiting effects in the adult world.
• While part of psychotherapy is retrospective it is also definitely about the present and future but in a similar way, the way you see your future may be very influenced and potentially constrained by your assumptions about what felt possible for you a long time ago.
• The modern Neuroscientific narrative of this would be that your earlier learned experience is used to predict the world you expect to encounter. It takes a long time to learn and a long time to forget and becomes the filter through which for example, help is perceived as criticism or perhaps separateness in a relationship is perceived as abandonment. So called prediction errors (surprising responses of kindness for instance) don’t necessarily cause the prediction to be updated unless the therapy conversation helps make a point of noticing them.
• Where memories can be recalled and spoken about (so called declarative memories) their present meaning may be more usefully reframed with a bit of work if you wish. 
• Many very early experiences like dependency in relationships, are beyond retrievable memory (so called non-declarative memories that are all we have in our first two or three years) and appear as automatic actions and repetitions throughout one’s life. With time though even these automatic predictions can become obsolete if a better set of predictions can be learned and adopted as a default.

A word on the effectiveness of Psychotherapy:

(An Effectiveness of 1 below is equivalent to a 31.4% improvement (or one standard deviation on a bell curve))

Source Mark Solms: The Only Cure - Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing (W&N, 2026). Solmes’ Psychotherapy data from various 1980s large meta-analyses and Psychoanalytic data from the 2014 Cochran Report

High blood pressure medications Avg. 0.56

Viagra 0.38

Asthma medications Avg. 0.5

Sleeping medications Avg. 0.3

Ibuprofen 0.14

Nicotine patches 0.18

Statins 0.15

SSRI Antidepressants Avg. 0.31

Anti anxiety medications Avg. 0.38

Anti psychotic medications Avg. 0.47

Methylphenidate (ADHD medication) 0.9

Psychotherapy (Most talking therapies including CBT) 0.85

Psychotherapy for Depression 0.73

Psychotherapy for Anxiety 0.75

Psychoanalysis (a longer term and more frequent treatment) general 0.9

Psychoanalysis for (Psycho) Somatic presentations 0.81

Psychoanalysis for Anxiety 1.08

Psychoanalysis for Depression 0.59

An important feature of Psychoanalysis particularly but also Psychotherapy to some degree is that follow up studies conducted one or two years later showed further improvement even though the treatment had stopped supporting the idea that talking therapies don’t just (as the saying goes) offer you a fish supper, they actually teach you to fish: they address the cause not just the symptom. Whilst pharmaceuticals are considerably cheaper, more available and have a general application and so are considerably more democratic, they only address symptoms not causes and only while you take them.

About me, I have helped people in the past who have experienced difficulties such as stress and anxiety, bereavement, redundancy, depression and feelings of hopelessness, relationship and sexual problems, family problems and concerns and difficulties with anger and I have many years of experience of dealing with workplace issues. I also teach psychotherapy on the Educational Psychotherapy diploma at the Caspari Foundation in North London.