Sometimes the difficulty is obvious. A relationship is hurting. Anxiety has tightened its grip. Something has ended. Life has changed.
Sometimes it is quieter. You are still functioning, yet no longer entirely at home in the life you are living.
I work with people caught at these thresholds.
My particular interest is in the places where relationship, identity and belonging meet: how we adapt to what life asks of us, what those adaptations protect, and what they may eventually cost.
We can become very good at being who a relationship, family, culture or circumstance needs us to be. Achievement can carry fear. Loyalty can contain love and self-erasure. Independence can be freedom or defence. Staying and leaving can each hold courage and avoidance.
Therapy is not about deciding too quickly which is which.
My work is grounded in psychosynthesis psychotherapy: an approach that takes suffering seriously without reducing a person to the symptom that brings them through the door. I am interested in what has shaped a pattern, what keeps it alive, and what becomes possible when there is enough awareness to choose differently.
Alongside my psychotherapy work, I bring a clinical background in NHS Talking Therapies and postgraduate training in psychology and CBT-informed psychological practice. I hold an MSc in Psychology with Distinction. This gives me a respect for both depth and structure—for meaning, but also for the patterns through which distress is maintained in everyday life.
A distinctive part of my practice is bilingual and cross-cultural psychotherapy.
My own life has been lived across Chinese and British cultures. I work in English and Mandarin, and sessions may move between the two.
Language does more than describe experience. Different languages can hold different memories, loyalties and versions of the self. Something understood clearly in English may become emotionally alive in Chinese; something difficult to say in one language may become possible in another.
You do not have to translate yourself into a simpler person.
Nor do you need to be Chinese or bicultural to work with me. I work with relationship difficulties, anxiety and low mood, shame and self-criticism, perfectionism, grief and separation, emotional disconnection, family expectations, identity and belonging, cultural displacement and significant life transitions.
Often the deeper question is not simply how to feel better, but:
How do I live more truthfully as myself without losing what I love, value or remain responsible for?
There is no requirement to arrive with the answer. Sometimes therapy begins with a clear problem. Sometimes only with the knowledge that the present way of living can no longer be the whole story.
Both are enough.
I offer psychotherapy online across the UK. In-person sessions are possible in Devon, particularly north and Exeter, subject to feasibility. You are welcome to contact me in English or Chinese to explore whether working together feels right.