Choosing a therapist is about more than qualifications or the letters after someone’s name. Experience and expertise matter, but so does something much harder to capture on a website: whether you feel comfortable with the person sitting opposite you.
I’m Agi, an Integrative Psychotherapist, BABCP Accredited Cognitive Behavioural Therapist, Schema Therapist and EMDR Practitioner. I specialise particularly in eating disorders, OCD, trauma and neurodivergence, drawing on different evidence-based approaches depending on the person and what we’re trying to understand together.
But that’s the professional introduction. There’s also a person behind all of those titles, and I think that matters in therapy too.
What I’m Like as a Therapist
I would describe my style as warm, curious and collaborative, but also active and appropriately challenging.
I’m not a therapist who will sit silently and occasionally nod. I’ll ask questions, share what I’m noticing, explain psychological ideas and offer a different perspective when I think it might be useful. Sometimes I’ll gently challenge something too, but there should always be a reason for it, and we should understand that reason together. At the same time, I don’t assume that because I’ve trained in psychology, I automatically know more about your experience than you do.
You don’t need to arrive knowing exactly what to say or have everything neatly organised. Some sessions may be structured and practical. Others might involve us slowing things down, following something unexpected or trying to understand something that doesn’t quite make sense yet.
I also value honesty and humour. Therapy can involve incredibly difficult experiences, but that doesn’t mean every moment needs to feel serious or clinical. There is room to laugh, disagree, change direction and say, “Actually, I don’t think that’s quite right.”
Therapy isn’t something you need to be good at. It’s something we work out together.
What Matters to Me in Therapy
At the heart of my work is a simple belief: People make sense in context. Our thoughts, emotions and ways of coping don’t appear from nowhere. They develop through our experiences, relationships, biology, nervous system, culture, identity and the environments we’ve had to navigate.
Sometimes the very patterns creating difficulties now began as understandable ways of coping, protecting ourselves, finding predictability or getting through something difficult. That’s why I’m much more interested in understanding “What is happening here, and why does it make sense?” than reducing somebody to a diagnosis.
I also don’t believe people should have to fit themselves around therapy. I work in a way that is trauma-informed, neurodiversity-affirming and responsive to individual differences, adapting how we work when there is a meaningful reason to do so.
Evidence matters enormously to me. So does the person sitting in front of me. Effective therapy needs both.
The Person Behind the Therapy
My route into psychology wasn’t purely academic. My own experiences were part of what first made me curious about how people make sense of what happens to them, why we develop particular ways of coping and why understanding something intellectually can feel very different from actually living through it.
But being a therapist is only one part of who I am. Outside the therapy room, I’m someone who likes having a few things going on at once, rarely sits still for very long and has a habit of becoming enthusiastically invested in new interests, sometimes more successfully than others.
None of that appears on my professional CV, but it is part of the person you’ll actually meet in therapy. So here are a few things about me that have absolutely nothing to do with my qualifications.
Little
Competitive
I love a good game, whether it's around a table or on a screen. How gracefully I accept losing may depend on the game.
to Get
Lost In
Give me something to read, build or solve and I'm usually quite content, preferably with something else going on in the background.
of
My Head
Sometimes the best counterbalance to lots of sitting, listening and thinking is simply moving and getting outside.
Strongest
Survive
I love plants. Unfortunately, loving plants and having green fingers appear to be entirely unrelated. The survivors deserve considerable credit.
Lifelong
Hobby
I discover something new, become completely invested and decide I've found my next great hobby… until another interesting thing appears.
People
in Charge
I may technically own two cats. They would almost certainly describe the arrangement differently.
A Therapy Room Where You Can Be Yourself
You don’t need to sit perfectly still, maintain eye contact or explain everything in the “right” order for therapy to be meaningful.
You’ll find fidget toys and art supplies in my therapy room, partly because I know myself that having something to do can sometimes make it easier to think, talk or concentrate. You’re welcome to use them, or not.
What matters is that we find ways of working that help you engage with therapy, rather than expecting you to adapt yourself to somebody else’s idea of what therapy should look like.
There isn’t a right way to be in therapy.
How I Work
I work collaboratively and use what we call a formulation, although I often prefer to think of it simply as developing a shared map of what is happening.
Together, we look at what brought you here, what may have contributed to the difficulties developing, what seems to keep them going now and what might need to change.
From there, we decide what approach makes sense. Sometimes that might be structured Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). At other times, EMDR, Schema Therapy, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT), Inference-based CBT (I-CBT) or another specialist approach may be more appropriate. Sometimes we may thoughtfully draw from more than one.
Integration doesn’t mean throwing lots of therapies together. We use what makes sense, when it makes sense, for a reason we both understand.
If you’d like to know more about my qualifications, specialist training, clinical experience, teaching, supervision, leadership and professional publications, you can find these separately on my Experience & Qualifications page.
Food For Thought
Effective therapy isn’t about being understood through a textbook. It’s about bringing what we know about psychology together with what only you can tell me about being you.
A Note from Agi
If you’re reading therapist profiles trying to decide who to contact, I know everyone’s descriptions can eventually start sounding rather similar.
I can tell you about my qualifications, the therapies I’m trained in and the areas I specialise in, and those things matter. But something much harder to communicate through a website matters too: whether you feel you can be yourself with the person sitting opposite you.
You don’t need to arrive with a perfectly organised explanation of what’s wrong. You can be unsure, contradict yourself or tell me something I’ve suggested doesn’t fit. You can need time to think, have something in your hands or look somewhere else while you’re talking. And you can absolutely laugh in a session that has otherwise been incredibly difficult.
I don’t expect to understand you simply because I’ve read the research or worked with somebody with a similar diagnosis before. My role is to bring what I know, remain curious about what I don’t, and work alongside you to understand the rest. For me, that’s where meaningful therapy begins.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
You don’t need to know which therapy you need or have everything figured out before getting in touch.
A free 15-minute discovery call gives us an opportunity to meet, talk briefly about what has brought you to therapy, ask any questions you might have and get a sense of whether working together feels like the right fit.