Our most significant suffering rarely happens in isolation. It happens in relationship with partners, parents, siblings, children, colleagues. And yet the patterns that make our relationships so painful are almost always rooted in something internal — parts of us formed long ago, in earlier relationships, that are still running the show.

This is why individual therapy can be one of the most powerful things you can do for your relationships — even when the other people in them never set foot in a therapy room.

Working with your relational world

I work with individuals who are navigating difficulty in their closest relationships — not as a couples therapist, but as someone who helps you understand your own part in the patterns, and what might genuinely shift them.

This might mean exploring what you bring to relationships from your family of origin. It might mean understanding why certain dynamics keep repeating across different relationships. It might mean finding a way through the grief of a marriage ending, or the particular pain of feeling fundamentally alone even when surrounded by people.

Whatever the presenting difficulty, the work always moves in two directions simultaneously — inward, to understand the parts of you that are driving the relational patterns, and outward, to consider the wider system you are part of and how change in you ripples through it.

An IFS and RLT-informed approach

I draw on two complementary frameworks in this work.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps you understand the inner landscape that shapes how you show up in relationships — the part that withdraws when conflict arises, the one that people-pleases at its own expense, the one that rages, or the one that has learned not to need anyone at all. Getting to know these parts — with curiosity rather than judgment — is where lasting relational change begins.

Relational Life Therapy (RLT), developed by Terry Real, brings a direct and compassionate focus to relational patterns themselves — the ways we move into grandiosity or shame, the losing strategies we deploy without realising, and what it actually looks like to show up differently in our closest relationships. RLT is honest, practical, and deeply relational in its approach.

Together these frameworks offer something unusually integrated — inner work and relational work, held in the same space.

What I work with

• Divorce and separation — including the grief, anger, identity loss and practical upheaval that accompanies the end of a significant relationship, and the work of rebuilding

• Difficult family dynamics — including painful or complicated relationships with parents, siblings or adult children, and the long reach of family patterns into present-day life

• Loneliness and disconnection — including the particular kind of isolation that can exist even within a full life, and the work of understanding what gets in the way of genuine connection

Working with the wider system

One of the distinctive things about this work is that it doesn't stop at the individual. Alongside your own inner work, I actively encourage clients to consider the relational system they are part of — how the people around them are affected by and contributing to the patterns in play, and how change in one part of a system creates the conditions for change elsewhere.

You don't need to bring your family into the room. But we will, in a sense, be working with them anyway.

Experience and discretion

I have over 25 years of clinical experience working with relational difficulty across a wide range of presentations and client backgrounds. I understand that this kind of work requires courage, and that for many people — particularly professionals — privacy is essential.

Everything discussed in our sessions is held in the strictest confidence, in full accordance with professional practice ethical guidelines.

Where we meet

Sessions take place at:

35 Great James Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3HB(a short walk from Russell Square and Chancery Lane)

or

Chedworth House, Lansdown, Stroud GL5

Online sessions via Zoom are also available.

Getting started

If you'd like a confidential conversation to explore whether this work might be right for you, I'd be glad to hear from you.