About me

A philosopher and psychologist by background, I completed my training in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy with first class honours.

I am a graduate of Trinity College Dublin (BA), the University of Edinburgh (MSc), and the London School of Economics (MSc).

I am an expat myself, and I find this gives me a natural rapport with my expat clients,many of whom may be struggling to settle in Germany, facing questions of identity, feelings of homesickness, or feelings of anxiety or depressed mood in response to their new surroundings. These are all difficult issues that provide a useful starting point for therapy.

As an Irish person, I was raised on a diet of non-stop conversation and humour. I believe both have a place in the therapy room, and I try to bring my own personality to the relationship with my clients, avoiding an overly professionalised tone.

I offer a caring therapeutic experience in a safe, respectful, confidential and non judgemental environment. I undertake continuous professional development (CPD) training on an ongoing basis. In compliance with ethical guidelines set down by the European Association for Psychotherapy (EAP) I undergo regular external supervision.

My approach

In therapy we are invited to experience our own story, to leave down the sometimes comfortable but rarely compelling accounts we have been given about ourselves by others, and to embark on a process of self-creation grounded in the reality of experience.

Effective psychotherapy can equip us with alternative ways of framing experiences, alternative vocabularies for describing ourselves, and alternative ways of being in relation to others.

I am trained as a humanistic, integrative therapist, so I am not wedded to one particular theory of psychotherapy. Rather I employ whatever approach I think may be helpful to the client.

The theories I tend to use most frequently in my practice are:

• humanism as a means to forming a therapeutic relationship;

• object relations as a means of understanding a client’s subjectivity through an exploration of the drama of their early relationships;

• existential psychotherapy as a way of situating the client as a subject that exists in, is produced and impacted by the culture that they inhabit;

• an emphasis on how language, particularly metaphor is used in session;

• a gestalt emphasis on the here and now as a means of keeping calling the client’s attention to their immediate experience;

• and emotion focused therapy (EFT) techniques when a client is struggling to connect with underlying emotions.