Psychological Therapy, Assessment,  and ADHD Coaching from Private Psychologists in Newmarket, Cambridge, and Online

Difficulties with our mood can be hard to notice and don’t just relate to feeling sad. Our mood may decline over time, meaning we might not realise we’re not feeling connected with our loved ones and don’t feel pleasure and joy in the things we used to. Negative or self-critical thoughts can seem to stick with us for hours, and this can start to affect our day-to-day life, relationships, and motivation. We might feel down, numb, irritable, and snappy, without being able to put our finger on why. It can feel like a huge effort just to get through the day. Seeing a psychologist can help us understand why we feel the way we do and what’s keeping us stuck. We can learn a range of evidence-based skills and strategies to manage our mood and reconnect with the things in our life that bring us meaning.

When we’re feeling stressed and anxious it can feel overwhelming and stop us doing the things that bring us meaning in our lives. We can find ourselves constantly worrying, trying to control everything to the smallest detail, struggling to concentrate, and unable to switch off. Just trying to manage the anxiety can feel exhausting.

I will help you develop a different relationship with your anxiety in which you’re not constantly fighting against it. We will work out where your anxiety is helpful and where it impacts your quality of life. I will help you learn strategies to allow you the freedom to focus on the things that are important to you, rather than having to put all your effort in to managing the anxiety.

Surviving a traumatic event, relationship, or early life experience can impact us in many different ways. We might have intrusive thoughts and memories, nightmares, flashbacks, or strong waves of emotions about the events, even years after they have happened. It can feel like the world is no longer safe and we’re constantly on edge or jumpy. We often blame ourselves for part of the event, or feel ashamed of how we reacted at the time or how we feel now. We can worry what other people think or how they’ll cope with hearing about it, leaving us feeling isolated. It’s common to start avoiding anything which reminds us of the trauma, and this can disconnect us from the things we used to enjoy.

Seeing a psychologist can help you understand why your brain and body are reacting the way they are. I will work with you to understand why you feel the way you do, and help you learn a range of evidence-based techniques to turn the traumatic memory into something that has happened in the past. We’ll aim to make it something that does not define how you live your life in the here and now. Evidence shows that by re-processing our past trauma, we often experience improvements in our anxiety, irritability, relationships, self-esteem, and physical health.

Sleep can impact every part of our lives from our mood, motivation, energy levels and concentration, to our physical health and performance at work, university, and hobbies. Struggling to get to sleep, waking during the night and feeling restless despite having slept for hours are all difficulties that I will be able to support you with.

I will work with you to understand what you’ve tried already, the root cause of your difficulties, and use different evidence-based techniques to support you to improve your sleep, depending on what will work best for you.

Being diagnosed with a long-term health condition can leave us feeling angry, isolated, scared, guilty, ashamed and a range of other emotions. We can feel we’ve lost our independence, security, and might be limited in doing the things that make up our identity. It can feel like our roles and relationships have changed and how we are viewed is not the same as before. It can be hard to talk to our loved ones about this and sometimes it can feel like our friends, families, and professionals just don’t get it. The way we feel about our long-term condition can start to have a really big impact on our lives beyond the physical symptoms. We can be tempted to try and ignore it completely. This can make things worse in the long term and can leave us feeling stuck and exhausted.

I have specialist training and extensive experience in a range of long-term conditions including long COVID, chronic fatigue and pain, fibromyalgia, CFS/ME, MS, and HIV.

Our work together would aim to help you come to terms with a new diagnosis or a condition you’ve been struggling with your whole life. We’ll aim to help you feel truly heard and understood. This can include processing the losses of identities and activities, and your fears for the future. I will be able to support you to feel more confident in managing your long-term condition, limit its’ impact to the physical symptoms themselves, and help you reconnect with the things that are most important to you.

Relationships can be the most rewarding experiences in our lives but also have the potential to cause us a huge amount of distress. We are all uniquely complex and trying to understand how to resolve the issues in our current relationships, or process our experiences from previous relationships, can be difficult. We can find ourselves stuck in unhelpful patterns without even realising what we’re doing.

I will be able to work with you individually if you have noticed a pattern in your relationships that you would like to change, or if you feel like you struggle to form meaningful relationships with others. I also offer joint sessions to work on a specific important relationship in your life with your partner, family member, or friend. The sessions will aim to help you understand and break unhelpful patterns, feel heard by each other, and move forwards in your relationship if that is what you both want.

We can develop fears and phobias for many reasons, and they can limit our lives. We may feel judged in social situations, unable to speak in public, or feel panicked at the thought of needles, dogs, confined spaces, crowds, heights, driving or water. We often cope by avoiding these things at all costs and can experience terror, panic attacks, or fainting when we are unable to avoid them. Sometimes this works well and other times it can mean we are unable to participate in events without significant preparations and anxiety, and sometimes miss out on things all together.

Psychological treatments for phobias are among the best evidenced and most effective of all mental health difficulties. I am trained in a range of evidence-based techniques to help you overcome your phobia, whatever that may be.

There are lots of different reasons why we can develop difficult thoughts about ourselves. These might be fleeting and easily forgotten or core parts of how we view ourselves. These thoughts might be reinforced by specific experiences in our childhoods, adolescence, and adulthood, or messages we are constantly given by the societies and cultures around us. We may have survived experiences of challenging relationships, stigma and discrimination, bullying, or feeling like we don’t have a voice. We can start to feel like we deserve these experiences, like there’s something wrong with us, or we’re just not good enough. We may find ourselves constantly trying to act like the person we think others want us to be, so people don’t see our “real” selves. This can make it hard to believe that others value us and can be exhausting.

I will help you make sense of your experiences and support you to understand and break the cycles that keep you from building your self-esteem. I understand how difficult it can be to focus on how we view ourselves, so I will make sure the work we do together is compassionate, at your own pace, and includes skills to help you cope along the way.

Habits can be hard to break. From compulsive spending, collecting, nail biting and skin picking, to smoking, procrastination, scrolling, gaming, and social media, our habits can have a big impact on our lives. Addictions can become all-consuming, and we can become incredibly well practiced at hiding them from our loved ones. We can often go through cycle after cycle of trying to change and ending up back where we started, feeling ashamed or like we’ve failed.

I will work with you to understand your difficulties and patterns in detail, and support you to reduce, change, or stop the behaviour all together, depending on your goals.

Panic attacks can be extremely scary and can closely mirror the symptoms of a heart attack. They can feel like we’re going to die or pass out and leave us feeling ashamed, exhausted, and anxious. Intrusive thoughts that conflict with our values can also leave us feeling guilty, ashamed, or anxious. Feeling compelled to perform specific actions and rituals can have a big impact on ourselves and our loved ones. Bi-polar can leave us feeling trapped, unable to pursue our passions, and struggling to find our sense of identity.

I will work with you to help you understand your difficulties and reduce the impact they have on your day-to-day life.