Counselling Services Sydney

Anxiety, stress and burnout

Worry that runs on whether or not there is anything to worry about. Sleep that will not come. A job you used to care about that now produces nothing but a low hum of dread. Burnout in particular tends to be treated as a scheduling problem, which is why rest alone so rarely fixes it. We look instead at what has been asked of you, what you have been unable to refuse, and what your body has been doing about it while you carried on. Practical enough to be useful in the week you are actually having.

People often want to know whether this is the same as being taught coping strategies. It is not, though useful things do get worked out along the way. The difference is that we are after the driver rather than the symptom.

Grief, loss and life changes

Death is the obvious one, and it is far from the only one. People grieve separations, miscarriages, careers, migrations, diagnoses, friendships that quietly stopped, and versions of a life that were never going to happen. Grief without a funeral attached gets very little social permission, which is exactly why it tends to go unspoken for years. There is no timetable here and no expectation that you should be further along than you are.

Anniversaries, the second year rather than the first, and grief that surfaces decades late are all completely ordinary. Nothing about arriving long after the event makes this a strange thing to bring.

Birth trauma and the perinatal year

I spent thirteen years as a registered midwife before I trained as a therapist, which makes this the area where my background does the most work. You will not have to describe an emergency caesarean, a haemorrhage or a special care admission from scratch, because I already know what those rooms are like. Open to birthing parents, partners and anyone else who was there. A birth that everyone else called fine can still be the reason you are here.

This also covers the wider perinatal picture: fertility treatment, pregnancy after loss, the first year of parenthood, and the identity shift that arrives with it and catches most people off guard.

Gender identity and gender diversity

For people who are questioning, people who are certain, people mid transition and people who worked it out years ago and simply want a therapist who will not make it the topic. I am not here to assess whether you have got it right, and I hold an undergraduate background in gender studies alongside the clinical training, so the basics do not need covering. Support people and partners working out their own response are also welcome.

LGBTQ+ affirming therapy

I am a queer woman, and part of my week goes to volunteer counselling work at ACON. What that buys you is time: you will not spend the first three appointments explaining terminology, correcting assumptions or working out whether it is safe to mention your partner. Coming out at any age, chosen family, minority stress, the specific exhaustion of always assessing a room, and everything else that has nothing to do with being queer at all.

Plenty of queer clients come to me about a job, a bereavement or a parent. Being affirming is not about making your identity the subject, it is about removing it as an obstacle to discussing anything else.

Relationship and interpersonal work

This is one person in the room working on how they relate, not couples therapy, which I do not provide in any form. We look at what keeps recurring across different people and different years: who you become around conflict, what you agree to when you mean no, how quickly you go quiet. Changing your half of a dynamic changes the dynamic more often than people expect it to.

Useful whether you are partnered, single, recently out of something, or noticing the same pattern at work and with friends as well as at home. Non-monogamous and relationship diverse arrangements are held without comment.

Self-esteem, body image and identity

The running internal commentary that nobody else can hear, and the long negotiation with a body that has been measured and remarked upon since childhood. Plenty of the people who bring this are outwardly capable, which is part of what makes it so hard to raise. We get curious about where that voice came from and what it was originally protecting, rather than trying to argue it into silence with affirmations.

Managing overwhelming emotions

Some people arrive because feeling comes too fast and too loud and costs them relationships. Others arrive because nothing comes at all and they cannot work out why. Both are nervous system patterns rather than character defects, and both respond to the same slow widening of what you can hold. The aim is not tighter control. It is more room, so that fewer things tip you over.

Expect this one to move slowly at first and then noticeably. Capacity is built rather than switched on, and the early sessions often feel like they are doing less than they are.

Personal growth and self-understanding

A fair number of the people I see are not unwell and not in trouble. They are functioning, often impressively, and they have arrived at a point where they want to understand what drives them before another decade goes past on autopilot. This work is open ended by nature and tends to be the most enjoyable, because there is no emergency setting the pace.

Complex family dynamics

The job you were given in your family before you could refuse it. The subject nobody names at dinner. Estrangement, and the guilt that arrives alongside the relief. Because this is individual work, none of it depends on your relatives agreeing, participating or even knowing you are doing it, which for many people is precisely what makes it possible.

Intergenerational patterns come up here too: the things that were done to the people who raised you and were passed down without anyone deciding to pass them on.

Trauma informed therapy

Less a separate service than the way I run every appointment. In practice it means nothing gets opened before there is enough steadiness to hold it, we go at the speed your system allows rather than the speed either of us would prefer, and you are never required to narrate something in detail to make progress. I do not provide EMDR or formal PTSD assessment, and I will say so early if that is what you need.

Developmental, relational, complex and single incident trauma are all within scope. So is the kind that never had an obvious event attached, which is frequently the hardest for people to give themselves permission to bring.

Somatic and body focused therapy

For anyone who can explain their own patterns fluently and remains completely stuck in them, which is more people than you would think. Drawing on Somatic Experiencing and Polyvagal Theory, attention goes to breath, posture, tension and what shifts in you as you speak. It is entirely verbal, there is no physical contact at any point, and it is nothing like a massage.