My approach

I was born in Singapore and grew up in Australia, with a Singaporean-Chinese mother and a white British father, before moving to Cambridge in 2021. Questions of home, belonging, and the complexities of identity matter a great deal to me, and they often find their way into the work I do.

How I trained, and how I'd describe myself

I'll be honest about my training: I hold a counselling qualification, but over time I've come to understand the difference between counselling and psychotherapy, and these days I'd place myself more on the psychotherapy side. Counselling tends to be less directive and more person-centred, oriented towards coping and guidance. Psychotherapy draws on psychodynamic thinking: working with the unconscious, and with the relational patterns we carry. It's less about diagnosis and more about what's actually happening between us in the room.

I usually describe myself as an integrative therapist. That broadly means I draw on a lot of different modalities rather than committing to a single school. I'm not the kind of therapist who'll tell you I am one fixed thing and only work one way. I'm interested in drawing from wherever is useful, while staying honest about what I am and am not formally trained in.

The way I work

The foundation of my approach is the relationship between us, the two people in the room. Whatever patterns play out in your life elsewhere will tend, sooner or later, to show up here too, and that's useful. Therapy becomes a space to notice those patterns as they unfold, and to experiment with doing things differently inside a relationship that's safe and boundaried, so that you can carry those changes back out into your life. In practice that means I'll often be fairly direct, and I'll use what I notice between us to reflect something back to you.

I also work creatively, which for me simply means anything that isn't just talking. I feel very at home working with the body, so we might pay attention to your breathing, or you might stand up, stretch, or move during a session. This comes partly from my background in yoga, though it's never a full yoga class; it's more about gentle movement and noticing what your body is telling us. Creative work might also mean working with objects, like an object constellation laid out from a bowl of pebbles, pine cones, or other small things, or putting pen to paper. I'm drawn to approaches like authentic movement and art therapy, though I want to be clear I'm not formally trained as an art or movement therapist; I borrow their spirit rather than claiming their titles.

The third thread is that I see therapy as much bigger than the fifty minutes we spend together. When you start therapy you're signing up for a process, a bit like learning a musical instrument: the point is what you do with it outside the room. So I tend to send people home with things between sessions, whether that's a podcast episode, a book, a guided meditation, or a journalling prompt. Expecting that some of the work happens out there, in your own time, is a helpful thing to set up from the start.

Who I tend to work with

I work with a lot of LGBTQ+ people, and I'm part of that community myself; I'm bisexual, and I'm happy to say so. That matters to me because it means you won't have to explain or justify the basics of your life before we can get to the actual work. I also work with GSERD: gender, sexual, erotic, and relationship diversity, which includes supporting people exploring or living kink, polyamory, and other forms of non-normative relationship and desire, without pathologising any of it.

Trauma is a significant focus of my practice, and I work in a trauma-informed way. A lot of people also come to me with depression or anxiety. I tend not to see either as a flaw to be fixed; more often they're what happens when we were never quite given the tools to cope with difficult feelings, for reasons that usually go back a long way and were never our fault. Because anxiety and low mood so often live in the body, as tightness, racing thoughts, flatness, or fatigue, the body-based and creative side of my work tends to come in here, alongside talking.

Beyond that, people come to me with grief, questions of cultural identity and dislocation, difficulties in their relationships, and the big transitions of a life: starting or leaving university, becoming a parent, the end of a relationship. I tend not to think of myself as having a single niche, and I've never turned someone away for what they arrived with. What feels most defining about me isn't a particular specialism; it's the way I approach the work, and I bring those same principles to whatever you bring.

Beyond the therapy room

Alongside therapy, I teach yoga, which lives on its own separate website. I'm also a writer and a meditator, and these all feed into how I think about being human.

And I should mention: I have two cats, who think of my studio as theirs and sometimes join sessions in person. They're sort of unofficial therapy cats. If you'd rather not share the room with a cat, in-person sessions might not be for you, and that's completely fine.