Hello, Welcome, I’m Kate
BACP Registered
Qualified Psychotherapist & Counsellor
Therapy grounded in curiosity, collaboration, and care.
Meeting you exactly where you are, and exactly how you are - and making room for all of you.
The heart of my work
Why settled?
Settled doesn't mean calm. It doesn't mean we’re sorted or have everything figured out.
To me, it’s closer to this: being able to stay with your experience as it is, in the moment - tuning in, listening, and feeling it.
It means to stay with the shaky ground when everything in you wants to run. To stay with the tender, throbbing place that opens up when things fall apart. To stay curious, open-hearted, and OK-enough with not knowing, before rushing to make sense of it all.
Life comes together and it falls apart. Then it comes together again - it does this over and over.
Making room for all of the grief, the relief, the misery, and the joy is what feeling settled means to me.
My approach is shaped by what it means to settle in yourself - meaning, how to live with authenticity, open-heartedness, and courage as you meet life’s challenges.
“The more we try to change ourselves, the more we prevent change from occurring. On the other hand, the more we allow ourselves to fully experience who we are, the greater the possibility of change.”
Dr Laurence Heller
How this shapes my work
In therapy, we explore what it’s like to be you - through your lived experience and the ever changing story of you.
Curiosity & Care
At the heart of my work is care. Not care for how we are, but a belief in care as who we are. The ways we think, feel, relate, protect ourselves, and move through the world are shaped by our experiences and our adaptations to them.
Over time, the adaptive patterns that helped us cope, belong, and find ways to stay connected can begin to feel limiting, and somehow out of sync.
Curiosity about how we want to live, and how we get in our own way, is where care meets curiosity.
Collaboration
Therapy is a dynamic encounter between two people with a shared mission - to explore your lived experience, and what matters to you.
So every therapeutic relationship has its own rhythm. What stays the same is the frame: we pay attention to what's said and what’s unsaid, and how your body communicates what words can't quite reach.
What matters most is a relationship built on trust, respect, and genuineness.
Adaptation
To adapt is to be human. To like things to feel familiar is also human - and there's the rub - the paradox that often brings us to therapy.
At its heart, therapy offers an opportunity to get to know ourselves more intimately. To meet the parts our adaptations hide - and who we truly are behind them.
We get curious about what more autonomy, self-trust, and connection may offer. The goal is not to become a new you - but to expand your capacity to feel more like you.
“We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know. When things fall apart and we're on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize ... Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it.”
Pema Chödrön
Therapeutic anchors
My approach is trauma-informed, integrated, and inclusive to make sure every part of you feels seen and held.
Relational
Our earliest relationships shape our sense of Self and other. They teach us how to connect, when to disconnect, and what feels safe - relational patterns that live on long after they were formed.
In therapy, we explore how you might relate to yourself more authentically, and develop a secure way of relating to others - whatever the relationship.
Embodied
Our connection to our life's energy often feels distant. Stress, emotions, and protective patterns live in our body, in the tension we carry, the breath we hold, the tears we prevent from falling, and the feelings we keep at a distance.
In therapy, we pay as much attention to what it's telling us as we do to a belief, a thought, or a pattern of behaviour.
Existential
This philosophical lens sees the humanity in our individual condition. It asks the big questions - how we make meaning, how we meet uncertainty and make choices, and how we relate to the life we are living in the face of ambiguity, anxiety, and the challenges our existence throws at us.
It is a worldview and an ethical stance, one that frames my therapeutic approach.
Training, Certification & Professional Grounding
Working ethically in private practice
I am registered with the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) with post-graduate training in post-traumatic complex stress approaches, including somatic embodiment and regulation strategies.
Post graduation, I am training under Linda Thai, one of the world's leading trauma-informed somatic therapists, and in training in the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) with Ralf Marzen through the Complex Trauma Training Institute.
I remain in personal therapy and am supervised by a UKCP attachment-based therapist whose clinical experience guides and supports my practice.
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Registered Member, British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (Professional Standards Authority Accredited). MBACP Register number 416929. Insured with Everywhen.
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MA, Psychotherapy and Counselling, Regent's University London
Diploma in Integrative Psychotherapy and Counselling, Regent's University London
Certificate in Integrative Psychotherapy and Counselling, Regent's University London
Post Graduate Certificate in Mindfulness-Based Approaches, Bangor University
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Certificate in Somatic Embodiment and Regulation Strategies (Levels 1-8), Linda Thai
NeuroAffective Relational Model Therapist Training (Module 1), Trauma Training Institute
CPD: Mentalization-Based Treatment, Anna Freud Centre
CPD: Working with the Disembodied Psyche, Susie Orbach
CPD: Building Better Boundaries, Terry Real
CPD: Attachment Theory in Clinical Practice, The Bowlby Centre
CPD: Trauma Informed Stabilisation Programme, Janina Fisher
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I work ethically and within my experience. Your wellbeing comes first, which is why I have clinical supervision and my own personal therapy. You're protected through professional indemnity insurance and the standards that BACP registration demands. I'm honest about our work and we mutually sign a contract outlining our working agreement. What we discuss stays private, except where there is serious risk of harm. If that arises, we talk about it together first.
how I came to be a therapist
I've been curious about life's big questions for as long as I can remember. Wherever my career took me - such as music, TV, branding, or startups - somehow the same question came up: why do we do what we do?
Psychotherapy gave me a new home for everything I'd unknowingly been moving towards.
