This Hart therapist is a qualified counsellor and psychotherapist. She specialises in both individual and family counselling. She has a keen interest in couples work as it encompasses the core of the family and involves people at various stages of their lives. Relationships are in constant transition as couples grow in different directions, weathering the storms of life. She has extensive experience working with trauma and how that impacts relationships and mental health.
This Hart therapist believes couple’s therapy is really being able to understand why we are the way we are. Our partner holds a mirror to us that reflects the best and worst parts of ourselves. She believes that unmet needs and unprocessed emotions manifest in behaviours and patterns that get replayed in our relationships. She aims to assist clients to gently recognise and reflect on themselves and their relationship to others. She tailors her approach the client and offers explanations and choices about how they want the therapy to proceed by setting goals, doing couple activities or keeping a journal. She particularly enjoys helping couples to examine their core values and beliefs.
She practices a person-centred approach, meaning the client is expert in their experience, the therapist is there to support growth and healing in the gentlest way possible. She believes that healing starts in a safe and trusting relationship between client and therapist. She practices a variety of modalities depending on the client’s needs. Within relationships, she works with loss of connection, communication difficulties, increasing intimacy, parenting tensions, unmet needs, expectations, cultural differences, affairs, separation and divorce, life-transitions, and grief and loss. She also has experience working with children and young people who may also be impacted by family tensions. She assists couples to move through each season of life, encouraging them increase empathy, patience and understand their relationship dynamics and patterns.
She is a mother and plant lover. She started her academic journey with a keen interest in sociology, only to find herself drawn to people, relationships and the bright inner worlds of children and infants. She has been working in the community non-profit sector with traumatised adults, children and young people for 10 years. She also teaches post graduate counselling students and is a clinical member of PACFA.