Therapy for Anxiety, Trauma and Relationship Challenges

Beginning therapy can take courage.

Whether you are navigating anxiety, relationship challenges, life transitions, or the lasting effects of stress or trauma, reaching out for support can feel vulnerable.

By integrating EMDR, TIST-informed parts work, Gottman Method Couples Therapy and RTT Clinical Hypnotherapy, I help clients create meaningful change at conscious, subconscious and nervous-system levels, supporting deeper change that goes beyond insight alone.

Over the years, I have come to believe something quite simple:

People make sense.

Even the patterns that cause the most distress, such as anxiety, self-criticism, emotional overwhelm, people-pleasing, shutdown, unwanted habits, relationship difficulties or feeling stuck often began as intelligent attempts to cope, adapt or survive.

When we understand our struggles through this lens, shame begins to soften. What once felt like evidence that something is wrong with us can start to make sense as part of our story.

This understanding sits at the heart of my work.

I am an accredited clinical counsellor, psychotherapist and clinical hypnotherapist based in Far North Queensland, offering therapy in Cairns, Kuranda and online throughout Australia.

Before moving into private practice, I spent many years working in frontline crisis support, education and school guidance counselling. These experiences taught me something that continues to inspire my work today: people are often far more resilient than they realise, particularly when they feel genuinely seen, understood and supported.

Understanding How We Adapt

My approach is grounded in contemporary neuroscience and the growing understanding that healing involves more than simply talking about our experiences. While insight is important, many of the patterns we struggle with are held not only in conscious awareness, but also within the nervous system, the body and the subconscious mind.

We now know that our experiences can leave lasting imprints on how we think, feel, relate and respond to the world around us. The good news is that the brain remains capable of change throughout life.

Healing is possible.

This understanding also shapes the way I work with relationships.

Our most important relationships can be places of connection, safety and belonging- but they can also activate some of our deepest patterns.

Couples can find themselves caught in cycles of conflict, criticism, defensiveness, withdrawal or disconnection, often without fully understanding how they arrived there.

I work with couples using Gottman Method Couples Therapy, drawing on evidence-based approaches to help partners understand the patterns within their relationship, strengthen friendship and connection, improve communication and create greater emotional safety.

Where appropriate, I can also offer the Gottman Relationship Checkup, a structured assessment that provides a detailed picture of a couple’s relationship strengths and areas of concern.

Completing the assessment can give both the couple and therapist a clearer starting point for therapy and help identify meaningful priorities for therapy.

Whether I am working with an individual or a couple, I am interested in the same fundamental questions:

What has happened?

What has been learned?

And what is happening now that keeps the pattern going?

Working With Change From Multiple Directions

This is why I integrate several complementary approaches, including EMDR, Trauma-Informed Stabilisation Treatment (TIST), Gottman Method Couples Therapy and RTT Clinical Hypnotherapy.

Together, these approaches allow us to work with healing from multiple directions.

EMDR helps the brain process experiences that may still be carrying emotional charge.

TIST helps us understand and relate differently to the protective parts of ourselves that may be working hard to keep us safe.

Gottman Method Couples Therapy helps partners understand the patterns within their relationship and develop more constructive ways of communicating, responding and reconnecting.

RTT Clinical Hypnotherapy can help access deeper subconscious beliefs, emotional learnings and automatic patterns that often operate outside conscious awareness.

Combined with nervous-system-informed and somatic approaches, this creates a therapeutic process that works not only with what you know, but also with what your mind and body have learned through experience - and, in relationship therapy, with the patterns that can develop between two people.

Many clients tell me that before therapy they spent years understanding their difficulties intellectually, yet still found themselves repeating the same patterns. This is often because insight alone doesn't always reach the deeper systems where those patterns were first established.

My aim is to help bridge that gap.

Moving Toward Greater Freedom, Connection and Choice

Whether you are navigating trauma, anxiety, grief, burnout, relationship difficulties, low self-worth, unwanted habits or simply a sense that life could feel easier than it currently does, therapy offers an opportunity to move beyond survival and toward greater freedom, connection and choice.

I don't believe people need fixing.

I believe people need understanding.

And when understanding is combined with safety, compassion and the right therapeutic approach, remarkable change can occur.