Therapy for the wounds
that don’t show up
on a checklist.
Depth-focused relational psychotherapy for complex and attachment trauma, relational pain, and the kind of disconnection from yourself that’s hard to name.
Complex and attachment trauma
Early relational wounds that didn’t look like trauma at the time, but have continued to shape how you move through relationships, trust others, and understand yourself. The kind that lives in the body and in patterns rather than in memories.
Relational pain and difficulty
Feeling distant, reactive, overly accommodating, or mistrustful in relationships. A sense that you disappear into other people, or keep others at a distance without quite meaning to. Patterns that repeat across different relationships, with different people.
Identity and self-worth
Struggling to know who you are outside of what you do, or who you’re for. A sense that your outward life and inner experience don’t quite match. Difficulty knowing what you actually want, feel, or need without first checking what’s acceptable.
Anxiety, depression, and emotional overwhelm
Not as a checklist of symptoms, but as expressions of something deeper that hasn’t yet been reached. Persistent low mood, anxiety that doesn’t fully respond to what you’ve tried, or emotional states that feel bigger than the situation calls for.
Disconnection from your own life
Moving through your life rather than being in it. Performing a version of yourself that works for everyone else, while something more essential has gone quiet. A sense of distance from your own experience that’s hard to name and harder to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it.
High-functioning distress
Outward success that doesn’t match the inner experience. Managing well enough that no one around you would know, including sometimes yourself. The work here is for people who are capable of a great deal, and are tired of spending that capability on being okay.
Two people in the room.
My orientation is relational and psychodynamic. What happens between two people in the room is itself the site of change. Not just what you talk about, but what gets discovered through the process of talking, and through what can’t quite be said.
Many people arrive having already done the work of understanding. They can name their patterns, trace their history, articulate what isn’t working. What they haven’t yet had is the experience of being genuinely received in their full complexity, without being managed, reframed, or moved along. Something different becomes possible in that kind of contact.
The question is never just what brought you here. It’s what you haven’t yet been able to say about it.
This is depth work. It takes time, and it asks something of both people in the room. I keep a deliberately smaller caseload so I can be fully present with each person I work with, holding the thread of what we’re doing across time, and being available when things come up between sessions.
The tools are shaped around the person,
not the other way around.
Relational psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a more advanced clinical orientation than general psychotherapy, one that draws on a deeper tradition of thinking about what actually changes in a person and why. It requires not just training but a sustained, ongoing commitment to one’s own development as a practitioner.
I engage in regular individual and group clinical supervision, and I continue my own personal therapy. The psychologists I consult with are among Australia’s leading psychoanalytic practitioners. These aren’t registration requirements. They are standards I hold for myself. Understanding my own edges, what I carry and what I can hold, is what allows me to be fully present with each person I work with. The work here is not about doing something to you. It is about being with you: learning the particular logic of your world, and finding together what can be lifted, and what can at last be put down.
For what lives in the space between people.
Most of what shapes our inner life was formed in relationship, and continues to show up in relationship. The work here is relational by design. What happens between us in the room isn’t incidental — it’s the primary site of change. We pay attention not just to what you say, but to what moves between us as you say it.
For what’s been avoided for a very long time.
ISTDP works directly with the defences we’ve built around feeling — the ones that once protected us and now keep us at a distance from our own experience. It’s precise, collaborative, and often surprisingly direct at reaching what’s underneath. The goal isn’t to push through. It’s to help anxiety and avoidance become workable enough that something real can finally be felt.
For the patterns that keep repeating.
TFP is particularly useful when the same relational patterns keep appearing across different relationships, and when understanding them intellectually hasn’t been enough to change them. It works with the way those patterns emerge in the therapeutic relationship itself, in real time, making them visible and ultimately transformable.
For the harshest internal critic in the room.
Many people who seek depth work carry a severe relationship with themselves — a critical voice that has learned to be relentless. CFT draws on research into self-compassion and shame to build a different internal relationship. It’s not about positive thinking. It’s about understanding where the harshness came from, and developing the capacity to meet yourself with something more generous.
“People describe a fuller sense of themselves. Greater ease with their own anger, desire, and grief. More capacity to be in relationships without disappearing. A feeling that the life they’re living is actually theirs.”
What tends to change isn’t only about symptoms, though that often follows. The shift is quieter and more fundamental than that. A growing sense of being present in your own experience. Less distance between who you are and how you move through the world.
It tends to arrive in small moments. Being able to hold your ground in a conversation where you once went silent. Catching an ordinary afternoon, light, unhurried, good, and realising you’re in it rather than watching it. Voicing yourself in conflict without it costing you days. Tolerating your own grief without it becoming catastrophic. Going somewhere new and actually being there. These are small wins that are, in this kind of work, enormous ones.
This kind of work is often quietly transformative. Sometimes that means staying with something difficult a little longer. Noticing what’s avoided. Being with a part of yourself that has felt like too much. The work trusts that understanding, and aliveness, emerge through presence, safety, and truthfulness, not through being rushed toward them.
A smaller caseload, deliberately.
I keep fewer clients than most practitioners — not as a constraint but as a commitment. It means I can hold the full weight of what each person brings, maintain continuity across time, and be genuinely available when things come up between sessions.
That quality of presence is what you’re investing in. If spending this on yourself feels complicated, that’s worth noticing — and it’s usually part of what we end up working on.
$275
Session fee- 50–60 minute individual session
- In-person at Miami, Gold Coast
- Telehealth available Australia-wide
- Walk-and-talk sessions available
$130 out of pocket with a valid Mental Health Care Plan from your GP. Total fee $275 — Medicare rebate covers the gap. No plan? The full fee reflects the depth and quality of specialist clinical work.
Questions worth asking before you begin.
Relational and psychodynamic approaches are particularly well suited to complex and attachment trauma, the kind that developed in relationships over time, rather than in a single identifiable event. This work doesn’t require you to repeatedly revisit or re-experience the past. It works with how the past shows up in the present: in your patterns, your body, and in what happens between us in the room.
CBT works primarily with thoughts and behaviours. It’s evidence-based and useful for many things. Relational psychodynamic work goes deeper: it’s interested in the emotional and relational architecture underneath those thoughts and behaviours, including what you can’t yet put into words. Where CBT often asks “what are you thinking?”, this work tends to ask “what are you feeling, and what has that feeling needed to stay hidden?” The relationship between therapist and client is the primary vehicle for change.
Yes. Psychodynamic and relational approaches have a substantial research base across decades of clinical study, with strong outcomes for depression, anxiety, trauma, and personality difficulties. Longer-term psychodynamic therapy has been shown to produce improvements that continue to develop after treatment ends. That finding is not consistently shown in shorter-term approaches. The relational and psychoanalytic tradition is among the most rigorously studied in psychology, and continues to be.
Many people who come to this kind of work have tried other approaches first. Often they describe doing the talking, doing the work, and still somehow feeling alone in it, or understood on a surface level but not quite reached. That experience doesn’t mean therapy won’t work for you. It may mean the approach, the depth, or the relationship itself wasn’t the right fit. The first session is a chance for us both to assess whether this is. That question matters to me as much as it does to you.
Yes. Sessions are available via telehealth to clients anywhere in Australia. The therapeutic relationship forms through presence and attention, and those qualities carry across a screen. In-person sessions are also available at Miami, Gold Coast.
A conversation, not an assessment. We’ll cover your history, what’s brought you here, and how you move through the world. By the end, we’ll both have a clearer sense of whether this is the right fit. You don’t need to have anything prepared or figured out. You don’t need to know exactly why you’re here. Most people don’t.
Yes, and it’s worth being honest about that. This is depth work: slow, relational, and often uncomfortable before it’s clarifying. If what you’re looking for is a structured skills program, practical coping tools, or a time-limited course of CBT or DBT, this probably isn’t the right fit. Those approaches have real value and may be exactly what someone needs at a given point.
This work tends to suit people for whom those approaches haven’t fully reached what’s underneath, or who know they need something more sustained, relational, and exploratory. If you’re not sure which category you’re in, a first conversation is a reasonable way to find out.
Long enough for the relationship to become something real: conflicted, disappointing, surprising, meaningful, and transformative; and for us to work with all of that. Some people work for six months and find what they came for. Others stay for years because depth work reveals itself over time. There is no predetermined program here. What matters is that the pace is yours, not a fixed structure imposed on something that doesn’t move that way.
You don’t have to know exactly why you’re here.
Most people don’t.
Booking a first session isn’t a commitment to therapy.
It’s a commitment to one conversation.