Depth-Oriented Psychotherapy for People Under Sustained Pressure
About My Practice
I am a psychotherapist working with people who carry sustained pressure in their lives. Many of the people I see are capable and outwardly functioning, yet experience persistent strain beneath that competence: overactivity of thought, difficulty disengaging from responsibility, or a growing sense that established ways of coping are no longer holding.
My practice is integrative, drawing on applied neuroscience, cognitive behavioural therapy and cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy within a framework grounded in how people construct their experience. Sessions are intensive and focused, offering space for careful analysis, emotional processing and deliberate change.
My approach prioritises depth over speed. While meaningful change can occur quickly, it is sustained through careful formulation, attentional work and the steady application of evidence-based methods.
Many clients come to me during periods of transition or sustained responsibility, when established coping strategies begin to show strain. The work focuses on understanding and restructuring the patterns that maintain distress rather than managing symptoms at the surface.
Clinical Foundations of My Work
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Background
My work developed through three distinct phases of professional life: doctoral research in literature, nearly two decades teaching in secondary and higher education, and postgraduate training in applied neuroscience at King's College London. Each phase deepened my understanding of how people construct meaning from experience, and how that construction can become a source of both resilience and distress. That thread now runs through everything I do in the consulting room.
Foundations
My practice is informed by cognitive behavioural therapy, cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy and applied neuroscience. I work from structured psychological formulation, integrating attentional training, behavioural experimentation and emotional processing within a contained therapeutic framework.
The structure is always in service of the person rather than the other way around. Formulation is used to understand your specific context, history and patterns of experience, not to reduce what you are carrying to a category or label. The aim is to deepen your expertise in yourself, and from that understanding, to enact meaningful change.
Credentials & Experience
I hold a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, a Postgraduate Diploma in Applied Neuroscience from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London, and am finishing a Level 5 Diploma in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy. Alongside formal training, I spent nearly two decades teaching in secondary and higher education across the United States and the United Kingdom.
Working Together
Working together requires commitment, honesty and a willingness to examine established patterns with care. I offer a structured and contained space in which difficult material can be explored without haste or judgement.
If the way I work resonates with you, arrange a 30-minute consultation. This is an opportunity for you to talk through what has brought you to seek support. From there, we both decide whether working together makes sense.
Clinical Method
How I Work
My work is structured and formulation-led. Rather than relying on open-ended discussion alone, sessions are focused and analytic, examining the interactions between thought, behaviour, emotion and physiological response.
Where appropriate, we incorporate behavioural experiments, attentional training and hypnotic techniques to strengthen regulation and integrate new patterns. The emphasis is on careful examination and sustained application rather than surface-level fixes.
Integrated Clinical Framework
My work draws on cognitive behavioural therapy, cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy, applied neuroscience and structured behavioural methods. These approaches are integrated within a contained therapeutic process rather than applied as isolated techniques.
Extended Session Structure
Sessions are 120 minutes in length, allowing sufficient time for careful formulation, experiential work and consolidation within a single sitting. The extended format creates the conditions for depth.
Structured and Deliberate Process
Each session has a clear focus informed by formulation. We work systematically with the patterns that maintain strain, and between sessions the work continues through reflection, behavioural application and ongoing refinement.
Who I Work With
I work with individuals who carry significant responsibility and operate under sustained pressure. Many are thoughtful, capable and outwardly functioning, yet experience persistent strain beneath that competence.
You may recognise yourself if:
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Decision-making feels relentless or isolating
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Work has become difficult to disengage from, even outside professional hours
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Perfectionism or overcontrol is beginning to carry a cost
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Periods of transition have unsettled established coping strategies
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You function well externally but feel internally overextended
This work is about understanding and restructuring the patterns that maintain strain, so that responsibility can be carried with greater steadiness.
If this resonates, arrange a 30-minute consultation. This is an opportunity for you to talk through what has brought you to seek support. From there, we both decide whether working together makes sense.
From Pressure to Practice
Lived Experience and Clinical Understanding
Beyond formal qualifications, my own experience of sustained pressure has shaped my understanding of what it actually feels like to carry responsibility over a long period of time. I know how easily competence can coexist with strain, and how difficult it can be to disengage from expectation when it has become part of how you understand yourself.
That experience informs my clinical work directly. It allows me to recognise the subtle ways pressure embeds itself in thought patterns, behaviour and identity, and to approach that material with steadiness rather than judgement.
Competitive athletics
Competing at junior national and university level in rowing required sustained discipline, focus and tolerance for pressure. Those experiences gave me a direct understanding of how high expectations can build capacity while quietly intensifying internal strain.
Education and teaching
Nearly two decades teaching in secondary and higher education, across the United States and the United Kingdom, required clarity of thought, structured communication and close attention to how individuals develop under pressure. Working closely with students navigating high expectations deepened my understanding of the psychological patterns that emerge under sustained demand.
International experience
Living and working across different countries exposed me to varied professional cultures and expectations. Adapting across those environments deepened my sensitivity to context, transition and the way identity shifts when familiar structures fall away.
Personal transitions
Like many of the people I now work with, I have navigated significant career transitions and periods of professional uncertainty. Those experiences gave me a direct and lasting respect for the psychological weight that accompanies change.
Academic Formation
Doctoral and Postgraduate Training
My background spans three distinct phases: a doctorate in English Literature, postgraduate training in applied neuroscience at King's College London, and clinical training in psychotherapy. Each phase deepened the same enquiry: how people construct their experience, and what becomes possible when they understand that process more clearly.
The PhD is where that inquiry began. A doctorate in English Literature is, at its core, a sustained education in how experience shapes character. In the classroom, I taught students to read carefully, to analyse the motivations behind a character's decisions, and to understand how experience shifts and reshapes a person over time. What literature does, and what psychotherapy does, is fundamentally the same thing: it takes the raw material of human experience and helps make sense of it. For nearly two decades, using books as the medium, that was my work.
When I began my Postgraduate Diploma in Applied Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London, it was not a departure from that enquiry but a deepening of it. Neuroscience gave me the biological underpinning for what literature had long suggested: that experience physically shapes us, that attention directs that shaping, and that we have more agency over that process than we typically realise. The brain, it turns out, works very much like a book. We write the stories of our experience through what we choose to attend to, and those stories become the lens through which we see everything that follows.
Integrating Disciplines
What literature, neuroscience and psychotherapy share is a constructivist understanding of the human mind. We do not experience the world directly. We construct it, from prior experience, from the stories we have learned to tell about ourselves, from the concepts we have been given by culture, family and circumstance. The brain internally sources the vast majority of what we perceive. What reaches us from the outside merely corrects what we already expect to see.
This is what my doctoral research examined through narrative. It is what my neuroscience training examined through biology. And it is what my psychotherapy practice examines through the patterns that bring people into the consulting room. The three disciplines are not separate strands that happened to converge. They are three angles on the same question.
What Pressure Taught Me
Sustained engagement with high-pressure environments has been a defining thread in my life. From competitive athletics to rigorous academic settings, I have worked within cultures shaped by expectation, evaluation and responsibility.
Those experiences taught me that pressure is rarely just about external demands. It is shaped by internal habits of attention, self-critique and standards that often go unexamined. Over time, my interest shifted from the environments themselves to the psychological structures they create in the people who inhabit them.
That shift is now at the centre of my practice. I work with people who carry responsibility seriously and think deeply, helping them examine what is being maintained beneath outward competence.
If the way I work resonates with you, arrange a 30-minute consultation. This is an opportunity for you to talk through what has brought you to seek support. From there, we both decide whether working together makes sense.
Psychotherapy as Structured Practice
Psychotherapy works at the level of the patterns that maintain difficulty, not just the presenting symptoms. Rather than concentrating solely on outcomes, the work examines the underlying cognitive, emotional and behavioural processes that shape how a person thinks, feels and responds.
Sessions are formulation-led and structured, integrating behavioural methods, attentional training and, where appropriate, hypnotic techniques within a contained clinical framework. The emphasis is on understanding and restructuring patterns rather than managing them at the surface.
Core Elements of Practice
4. Long-Term Integration
The aim of the work is sustained restructuring of the patterns that maintain strain, not short-term relief. Over time, responsibility can be carried with greater steadiness and less internal friction.
As patterns become clearer and more flexible, individuals are better able to regulate attention, disengage from unhelpful loops and respond to pressure deliberately rather than reactively.
The emphasis is on durable psychological organisation rather than temporary motivation.
3. Intensive Session Structure
Each 120-minute session provides the time required for careful formulation, sustained exploration and experiential work. The extended format allows material to be examined thoroughly rather than addressed in fragments.
Each session is shaped around what you bring into the room that day. The formulation evolves as the work deepens, ensuring that the structure always serves your specific patterns rather than a predetermined sequence.
The emphasis is on depth and precision: working carefully with what maintains strain rather than applying generic strategies.
2. Integrated Clinical Application
No two individuals present with the same patterns. The structure of the work is shaped around your history, responsibilities and the specific experiences characterising your difficulty, rather than delivered through a fixed programme.
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Behavioural experimentation to test and revise established patterns
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Attentional training to strengthen regulation and reduce cognitive overactivity
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Expressive writing and structured reflection to process emotionally charged material
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Hypnotic techniques, where appropriate, to support attentional focus and integration
Each method is selected through formulation rather than applied generically. The emphasis is on deliberate restructuring rather than surface-level adjustment.
1. Research-Informed Psychological Work
My practice is informed by contemporary research in affective neuroscience, behavioural science, clinical hypnosis, memory and emotional regulation, including the work of:
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Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD (Northeastern University) — neuroscientist and psychologist, pioneer of the Theory of Constructed Emotion
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Judson Brewer, MD, PhD — neuroscientist and psychiatrist specialising in habit formation, addiction and anxiety regulation
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David Spiegel, MD (Stanford University) — psychiatrist and leading researcher in clinical hypnosis and attentional control
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James Pennebaker, PhD (University of Texas at Austin) — pioneer in expressive writing and emotional processing research
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Charan Ranganath, PhD (University of California, Davis) — cognitive neuroscientist specialising in memory and time perception
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Ethan Kross, PhD (University of Michigan) — psychologist researching self-talk and emotional regulation
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Lisa Miller, PhD (Columbia University) — researcher in the psychology and neuroscience of spirituality
Credentials & Experience
My professional training spans psychotherapy, applied neuroscience and cognitive behavioural approaches to psychological change. I hold a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham and a Postgraduate Diploma in Applied Neuroscience from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London. My clinical training includes cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy and structured cognitive-behavioural methods, alongside nearly two decades of teaching in secondary and higher education across the United States and the United Kingdom.
Academic Background
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BA, University of Pennsylvania
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PhD, University of Birmingham
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PGDip, Applied Neuroscience, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London
Professional Qualifications
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Master Practitioner of NLP
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Qualified Teacher, secondary and sixth form education, United Kingdom
Ongoing Professional Development
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Level 5 Diploma in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy (finishing)
Is This Work Right For You?
Choosing a psychotherapist is an important decision. This work is structured and depth-oriented, and the right fit matters for both of us.
It may be appropriate if you:
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Carry significant responsibility and experience sustained internal pressure
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Value structured, formulation-led psychological work
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Prefer extended sessions that allow material to be examined thoroughly
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Are seeking depth rather than surface-level fixes
This is deliberate, sustained psychological work. If that resonates, arrange a 30-minute consultation. This is an opportunity for you to talk through what has brought you to seek support. From there, we both decide whether working together makes sense.