Hi, I'm Samantha

I'm a warm, down-to-earth and compassionate therapist with a particular interest in relational trauma, attachment and the lasting impact our early relationships can have on the way we experience ourselves and others.

My journey into counselling actually began from the other side of the therapy room.

During a difficult period in my own life, I experienced counselling as a client. That experience eventually led me towards training as a therapist and gave me an appreciation of just how vulnerable it can feel to sit opposite someone and begin talking about the parts of your life that perhaps you've kept hidden, questioned or carried alone.

Why relational trauma?

My interest in relational trauma developed through both my professional work and my own personal experiences.

There came a point when I began looking differently at some of the relationships in my own life — both personally and professionally — and became curious about the dynamics that had influenced them.

Understanding relational patterns helped me recognise something important: we can become so focused on maintaining relationships, meeting expectations and understanding everybody else that somewhere along the way, we lose sight of ourselves.

That understanding has greatly influenced the therapist I am today.

I have a particular interest in supporting adults who have experienced difficult family relationships, including narcissistic family dynamics, emotional manipulation, people pleasing, parentification, difficulties with boundaries and relationships in which their own needs have become lost.

My role isn't to tell you who is right or wrong, diagnose the people in your life or tell you what decisions you should make.

Instead, we'll become curious about you — what you've experienced, how you've adapted, what you need and whether the patterns that once helped you maintain relationships are still serving you today.

What am I like as a therapist?

I would describe myself as warm, nurturing, curious, compassionate and gentle.

Clients often tell me that they don't feel judged when talking to me. I also frequently hear:

“I'd never thought about it like that before.”

And sometimes, perhaps most importantly:

“I thought it was me.”

Those moments matter to me.

Therapy can provide an opportunity to look at your experiences from a different perspective — with curiosity rather than judgement and understanding rather than shame.

I won't sit silently and expect you to work everything out alone. I work collaboratively and will share observations, help you make connections and offer psychological understanding and psychoeducation where I think it may help you make sense of what you're experiencing.

A neurodiversity-affirming approach

I am neurodivergent myself, which also influences the way I work.

I understand that people don't all process information, emotions, relationships or the world around them in the same way.

Rather than asking “What's wrong with me?”, therapy can sometimes help us ask a very different question:

“What do I need?”

Recognising that our needs may be different from those of the people around us can be an important part of understanding and accepting ourselves.

What I believe about therapy

For me, therapy is about learning how to navigate life's experiences and relationships without losing ourselves and our own happiness in the process.

As adults, we cannot always change the people around us or what has happened to us.

But we can begin to understand ourselves differently.

We can recognise our needs.

We can learn where our responsibility ends and somebody else's begins.

We can develop boundaries.

We can make choices about the relationships we want to have.

And we can gradually become more comfortable believing that our needs matter too.

My hope is that therapy with me gives you an experience of feeling understood, accepted and less burdened by shame — perhaps especially if you've spent much of your life feeling that everybody else's needs mattered more than your own.