Qualifications & Professional Registration
- Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist – British Psychoanalytic Council Registered – BPC Reg No. 11609
- Registered Mental Health Nurse from 1991 – NMC RMN: 88A2543E
- MSc In Psychological Interventions – University of Exeter
- MSc Clinical Research & Practice in Psychotherapy – University of Exeter
- Diploma in Clinical Supervision– Iron Mill Institute (2000)
- IPT Practitioner Training – Leicester Partnership NHS Trust (2005)
Additional Specialist Training:
- Relational Risk Assessment
- IPDE Risk Assessment
- Group Analysis
- Family Therapy Interventions
- Cognitive Analytic Therapy Relational Mapping
Therapeutic Approach
Claire is a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist with over 30 years’ experience across adult mental health. She specialises in supporting individuals with complex emotional needs, including trauma, relational difficulties, personality issues and longstanding psychological distress.
Her approach is warm, reflective, and collaborative. She offers both short- and long-term therapy, informed by psychodynamic, relational and trauma-focused approaches. She works sensitively with neurodivergent individuals, those from LGBTQ+ and minority backgrounds, and people who have experienced early adversity or abuse.
Specialisms
Areas of focus:
- Trauma, complex trauma and dissociation
- Personality issues and emotional dysregulation
- Early attachment difficulties
- Abuse and neglect, including childhood sexual abuse, emotional abuse and coercive control
- Loss, identity and relational conflict
- Neurodivergence, diversity and minority experiences
Therapeutic work and professional practice:
- Psychoanalytic psychotherapy, offered weekly or twice weekly
- Complex assessment and formulation
- Relational risk assessment and management
- Trauma-informed and attachment-based practice
- Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT)
- Group psychotherapy and therapeutic community work
- Reflective practice facilitation and clinical supervision
- A collaborative, relational and containment-focused therapeutic style
Experience
Claire is a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist and Registered Mental Health Nurse with over 30 years’ experience across NHS adult mental health services and private practice. Her background includes work as a mental health nurse, service manager, clinical supervisor and psychotherapist, including 14 years in Complex Emotional Needs settings delivering individual and group psychotherapy.
She is experienced in working with eating disorders, depression and anxiety, complex trauma, relational difficulties, addictions, attachment difficulties and other mental health difficulties.
Skilled in complex assessment, formulation, reflective practice, and providing safe, containing therapeutic relationships for clients with significant emotional and interpersonal difficulties.
Experienced supervisor, service lead, and contributor to trauma informed, relationally focused services and therapeutic settings.
What to Expect
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy offers a space to think more deeply about emotional difficulties, relationship patterns, anxiety, depression, loss, trauma, identity and life transitions. It is based on the understanding that our past experiences and unconscious patterns can shape how we feel about ourselves and how we relate to others in the present. Often, patterns developed earlier in life can continue to affect how we experience ourselves, our relationships and the world around us.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy helps bring these patterns into awareness, allowing for greater understanding, emotional freedom and the possibility of change.
Claire offers a confidential and reflective therapeutic relationship in which difficult thoughts and feelings can be explored safely and at a manageable pace. She aims to create space to slow things down and think together about experiences that may feel confusing, painful or hard to put into words.
Her approach is thoughtful, compassionate and relational. She believes that being listened to carefully can create the conditions for meaningful change.
During an initial session, Claire and the client think together about what the client is looking for from psychotherapy and explore whether working together feels like the right course of action for both. When regular sessions begin, the initial sessions are used to explore the client’s history so the work can begin from a place of deeper understanding of the issues being brought to psychotherapy.
Availability & Fees
Claire offers both short-term and longer-term psychotherapy to adults. Short-term work (typically 16–24 sessions) can provide focused support around a particular difficulty or period of crisis, while open-ended therapy allows for deeper and more exploratory work over time.
Sessions are available weekly or twice weekly, depending on individual need and what feels most supportive therapeutically.
Fees are £90 per session (50 min), and Claire has availability on Tuesday afternoons, Wednesday afternoons/evenings and Thursdays in Exeter. Other times may be possible by negotiation. Online sessions are available by arrangement.
