Are you not enjoying pregnancy or postpartum in the way you hoped?
- Feeling low or depressed
- Having difficulty managing emotions such as anger and sadness
- Having intrusive and distressing thoughts, including thoughts about harming your baby
- Experiencing challenges in your relationships
- Feeling overwhelmed with stress, anxiety or feeling the need to be perfect
- Grieving after a miscarriage or baby loss
- Finding previous life challenges, including childhood experiences, resurfacing
- Finding that a difficult or traumatic birth experience is still impacting you
- Struggling to adjust to your new identity, life, or body
These are all common challenges in the perinatal period. You are going through a time of huge transition, where so much might be changing for you: your identity, your routines, your relationships, your hormones, your sleep, and the time you have for yourself and the things that once helped you cope.
Struggling during such a significant life change is not a reflection of how much you love your baby or how good a mother you are. It simply means you’re going through an intense period of adjustment and may need some extra support to help you navigate the challenges and changes that come with this new chapter.
It can be scary and isolating to be experiencing these challenges but therapy can help you to overcome them.
Therapy can help you to…
- Feel more confident as a mum by learning to turn down your inner critical voice
- Feel more grounded and in control by gaining tools to manage overwhelming stress, anxiety, and emotions
- Rediscover joy in motherhood by gently challenging unhelpful thoughts and behaviour patterns
- Remove distress from intrusive thoughts and no longer feel compelled to do compulsive behaviours
- Improve your relationships by understanding how past experiences influence your current relationship patterns
- Find space to grieve after miscarriage or baby loss in a warm, compassionate environment
- Begin to heal after a traumatic birth by being supported to process what happened
- Grow into your new identity and life as a parent and make self-aware decisions that feel right for you
- Be more present in motherhood by having space to process and move forward from past challenges
How I work
At the heart of how I work is providing a non-judgemental, compassionate space where you feel heard, understood, and supported.
I draw upon my training in a range of evidence-based approaches—including person-centred therapy, CBT, and compassion-focused therapy—so our work together can be shaped around what feels most supportive for you. In our first session, I’ll suggest some ways we might work together, and you can choose the approach what feels most helpful.
I can also share my specialist knowledge of perinatal mental health to help you make sense of your experience—so you feel more understood and less alone.
You’ll never be asked to share more than you’re ready for and you don’t need to be at breaking point to benefit from therapy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Everything we discuss in our sessions remains entirely confidential. The only exception to this would be if I had a serious concern about yours or somebody else’s safety and we were not able to find a way together to ensure safety without confidentiality being broken. I am also legally obliged to release client notes if ordered by a judge or coroner.
As a registered member of the BACP, I am required to have clinical supervision with an experienced therapist on a monthly basis to ensure ethical and efficient practice. As part of my supervision, I may discuss our work but I ensure that only necessary details are disclosed.
This can vary depending on your situation and aims for therapy. Part of the way I work is by checking in regularly to gain your feedback on how you are finding your sessions. As part of this process, we can discuss what number of sessions in the future feels best for your situation. I do have experience working in both a short term (around 6 sessions) and long-term/ open-ended way. If you are only able to have a certain number of sessions, please let me know at the start of our work together and we can discuss and plan for what is realistic to approach and aim to achieve in this time. I am able to accommodate any length of therapy within my practice.
It’s normal to sometimes not know where to start discussing what is going on for you. As a therapist, I am trained to listen and ask questions in a way which helps you to explore and better understand your challenges.