Psychological Assessment

All good therapy starts with a comprehensive, individualised assessment, focused on your particular needs.  My initial assessment lasts between 60 and 90 minutes and will be the basis for ongoing therapy if we decide to work together.  

The initial assessment should provide you with

• a good, shared understanding of the issues you are struggling with
• some ideas about how these issues might be resolved
• a plan for therapy, if appropriate

Clinical Psychologists have the benefit of being trained across a variety of different theoretical models of therapy, across the life span.  So often, I will take a more integrated approach which can be tailored to meet your specific needs rather than offering one specific therapy alone. However, I do have specific models and theories of psychological therapy that I specialise in, and find particularly helpful in helping people work through life's challenges.

These include:

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT)

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

and Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR). 

I may also help you to make sense of your difficulties in the context of early life experiences and relationships with others.​

Usually, one of the first steps is to support clients to feel more able to manage intense emotional states and to start to be able to think more clearly.  I  may start by talking a lot about how our emotions affect our physiology and identify how we might use what we know about mind-body links to establish a greater sense of psychological and physiological safety.