Life brings challenges that can overwhelm our capacity to cope — anxiety that limits daily functioning, depression that drains meaning from existence, relationships that cause more pain than joy, trauma that continues affecting us years later, or simply the sense that something isn’t quite right even when circumstances seem fine. Psychotherapy offers a structured, professional approach to understanding and working through these difficulties.
As a UKCP-accredited psychotherapist with experience supporting people facing diverse psychological challenges, I provide individual therapy for adults dealing with anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, trauma, bereavement, life transitions, low self-esteem, and other emotional struggles. My integrative approach draws from psychodynamic, humanistic, and creative therapeutic methods, tailoring the work to your specific needs rather than applying a rigid one-size-fits-all model.
Whether you’re experiencing a specific crisis or struggling with long-standing patterns that affect your relationships, work, or sense of wellbeing, psychotherapy provides space to explore these difficulties, develop insight, and create lasting change.
What Is Psychotherapy?
Psychotherapy is a collaborative process between therapist and client that helps you understand and work through emotional difficulties, psychological challenges, and patterns of behavior causing distress. Unlike talking with friends or family, as valuable as that is, psychotherapy involves a trained professional using evidence-based approaches within a confidential, boundaried relationship designed to facilitate psychological change.
Sessions provide dedicated time and space to focus entirely on your inner world: your thoughts, feelings, relationships, experiences, and the patterns that shape your life. The therapist brings expertise in understanding psychological processes, skill in helping you explore difficult territory, and commitment to your wellbeing without the personal agenda that inevitably exists in other relationships.
Psychotherapy differs from counselling in its depth and scope. While counselling often addresses specific current issues with practical, solution-focused approaches, psychotherapy explores deeper patterns, examines how past experiences shape present behavior, and addresses more complex or chronic psychological difficulties. That said, psychotherapy isn’t necessarily long-term — some people achieve their goals within a few weeks, while others benefit from more extended work.
Common Issues I Work With
Anxiety and Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety manifests in many forms: generalized anxiety where worry pervades daily life; social anxiety that makes interpersonal situations terrifying; panic attacks that create fear of having another panic attack; specific phobias that limit your activities; health anxiety that leads to constant worry about illness; or performance anxiety that interferes with work, exams, or public speaking.
The physical symptoms of anxiety, including racing heart, shallow breathing, muscle tension, nausea, dizziness, can be as distressing as the psychological experience of fear, catastrophic thinking, and feeling out of control. Many people with anxiety develop avoidance patterns that gradually constrict their lives, declining social invitations, avoiding certain situations, or organizing everything around managing anxiety.
Psychotherapy helps you understand what fuels your anxiety, explore where it originated, challenge the thoughts and beliefs maintaining it, and develop more effective ways of relating to anxious feelings. The approach isn’t about eliminating anxiety entirely as some anxiety is normal and even helpful, but about reducing it to manageable levels and preventing it from controlling your life.
Depression
Depression can feel like living in greyscale — a profound loss of pleasure in previously enjoyed activities, difficulty finding motivation for even basic tasks, hopelessness about the future, and sometimes wishes that you simply didn’t exist. Depression affects sleep, appetite, concentration, energy, and your sense of self-worth. For some, depression comes in discrete episodes; for others, it’s a chronic condition requiring ongoing management.
Depression often involves harsh self-criticism and negative beliefs about yourself, the world, and the future. You might struggle to accept that you have depression, interpreting symptoms as laziness, weakness, or failure. Shame about depression can prevent you from seeking help, creating a cycle where untreated depression worsens.
Psychotherapy for depression involves understanding what contributes to your particular experience of depression (which varies significantly between individuals), challenging negative thought patterns and beliefs, exploring underlying emotional pain or unresolved experiences, and developing strategies for managing symptoms. We work on what depression means to you, how it serves or protects you (even as it causes suffering), and how to build a life with meaning and engagement even if some depressive vulnerability remains.
Relationship Difficulties
Relationship struggles take many forms: repeated patterns where relationships follow similar unsatisfying trajectories; difficulty maintaining long-term relationships; conflicts with partners, family members, or friends that seem unresolvable; feeling unfulfilled in relationships despite partners who seem objectively suitable; inability to leave unhealthy relationships; or difficulty forming intimate relationships at all.
Often these patterns have roots in early relationship experiences; how your family expressed emotion, managed conflict, or demonstrated love shapes your adult relationship expectations and behaviors. Psychotherapy helps you understand your relationship patterns, examine how past experiences influence current relationships, develop insight into your role in relationship difficulties (without blame or judgment), and create more satisfying ways of relating to others.
Sometimes the work involves improving current relationships through better communication, boundary-setting, or understanding your partner’s perspective. Therapy also helps you to recognize that certain relationships aren’t healthy and support you through the difficult process of ending them. The goal is authentic, satisfying relationships rather than simply maintaining relationships at any cost.
Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress
Trauma, whether from single incidents like assault or accidents, or ongoing experiences like childhood abuse or domestic violence, can create lasting psychological impacts. Post-traumatic stress symptoms include intrusive memories or flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilance, avoiding reminders of trauma, emotional numbness, difficulty trusting others, and disrupted sense of safety in the world.
Trauma therapy requires careful, paced work. The goal isn’t to simply recount traumatic experiences repeatedly, which can be retraumatising, but to gradually process these experiences in a way that reduces their ongoing psychological impact. This involves building resources and coping strategies, establishing safety in the therapeutic relationship, processing traumatic memories when you’re ready, and integrating these experiences into your life narrative without letting them define you.
The therapeutic approach we take will depend on the nature of your trauma, your current symptoms, and what feels manageable for you.
Bereavement and Grief
Grief following the death of someone important is a normal human experience, but that doesn’t make it less painful or easier to navigate. The intensity and duration of grief often surprises people, particularly in a culture that expects you to “move on” relatively quickly. Complicated grief, where the grieving process becomes stuck or unbearably intense, may develop, especially if the death was traumatic, the relationship was conflicted, or you lack support.
Psychotherapy for bereavement provides space to express and process grief without others’ discomfort or expectations. We explore your relationship with the person who died, including both loving and difficult aspects, work through feelings like guilt, anger, or regret that often accompany grief, and help you adjust to life without this person while maintaining meaningful connection to their memory.
Grief also arises from non-death losses: relationship endings, job loss, moving away from important places, children leaving home, loss of health or capabilities through illness, or dreams that will never be realized. These losses deserve space for grief even though society often minimizes them.
Life Transitions and Existential Concerns
Major life transitions, such as becoming a parent, career changes, moving locations, divorce, children leaving home, retirement, aging, illness, can trigger psychological difficulty even when the changes are positive or chosen. Transitions disrupt identity, relationships, routines, and assumptions about life, requiring psychological adjustment that can be more challenging than anticipated.
Some people seek therapy during transitions not because of specific symptoms but existential questions: What am I doing with my life? What matters to me? Who am I beyond my roles? Is this all there is? These questions can emerge during midlife but also at other pivotal moments when life’s direction becomes unclear or unsatisfying.
Psychotherapy provides space to explore these questions without pressure to find immediate answers. We examine what gives life meaning for you, what values guide your choices, and how to live more authentically aligned with your actualpriorities rather than internalized expectations from family, culture, or earlier life stages.
Low Self-Esteem and Self-Worth
Chronic low self-esteem affects many aspects of life: accepting less than you deserve in relationships or work, difficulty asserting yourself or setting boundaries, harsh self-criticism, disbelief when others offer compliments or appreciation, and avoidance of challenges for fear of confirming your inadequacy.
Low self-esteem often has roots in early experiences—perhaps you received constant criticism, experienced bullying, felt you never met parental expectations, or lacked positive mirroring that helps children develop healthy self-regard. These experiences create beliefs about yourself that persist even when current evidence contradicts them.
Psychotherapy helps you understand where low self-esteem originated, examine beliefs about yourself with more objectivity, challenge the inner critic that maintains negative self-perception, and develop more compassionate, realistic self-regard. This work goes deeper than affirmations or positive thinking to address the underlying psychological structures maintaining low self-worth.
Stress and Burnout
Chronic stress from work, relationships, financial pressures, caregiving responsibilities, or combinations of these can lead to burnout — physical and emotional exhaustion, cynicism, sense of reduced accomplishment, and feeling overwhelmed by demands that once felt manageable. You might recognize intellectually that changes are needed but feel unable to make them, trapped by circumstances or internal pressures.
Psychotherapy helps you understand what drives your stress patterns, explore what you’re avoiding through constant busyness or overcommitment, examine beliefs about productivity and worth, and develop more sustainable approaches to life demands. Sometimes stress relief requires practical changes in circumstances; often it requires psychological shifts in how you relate to demands, set boundaries, or define success.
My Therapeutic Approach
I practice integrative psychotherapy, meaning I draw from different therapeutic traditions rather than adhering rigidly to one approach. This integration includes:
Psychodynamic Therapy – Exploring how past experiences, particularly early relationships, shape current patterns; examining unconscious processes and defense mechanisms; understanding how you relate to others based on internalized relationship templates.
Humanistic Therapy – Emphasizing your inherent capacity for growth and self-understanding; creating a genuine, authentic therapeutic relationship; focusing on present experience and subjective meaning rather than expert interpretation.
Creative and Experiential Approaches – Using methods beyond traditional talking therapy when verbal expression feels limited; incorporating imagery, metaphor, or creative techniques to access and process emotions; recognizing that psychological healing isn’t purely intellectual.
The specific approach used depends on your needs, what you’re working on, and what methods resonate with you. Some people benefit primarily from exploratory psychodynamic work; others need more structured, present-focused strategies; many benefit from combinations. The work is collaborative — you’re not a passive recipient of treatment but an active participant in the therapeutic process.
What to Expect from Therapy
The Initial Consultation
We begin with an initial consultation where you describe what’s brought you to seek therapy, and I explain how psychotherapy might help. This session allows us both to assess whether we’re a good fit. Not every therapist suits every client — therapeutic relationships have chemistry that’s important to successful outcomes. If we both feel comfortable proceeding, we’ll arrange regular sessions.
The Therapeutic Process
Sessions typically last 50 minutes and happen weekly, though frequency can adjust based on your needs and circumstances. Consistency matters as regular sessions create the safety and continuity that allows meaningful psychological work. What you discuss remains confidential within professional ethical boundaries.
The early sessions often focus on understanding your difficulties, exploring relevant history, and establishing the therapeutic relationship. As therapy progresses, the work deepens — you develop insight into patterns, experiment with different ways of thinking or behaving, process difficult emotions, and gradually experience psychological change.
Therapy isn’t always comfortable. Exploring painful experiences, examining patterns you’d rather avoid, or sitting with difficult emotions can be challenging. The therapist’s role is to accompany you through this difficulty while ensuring you’re not overwhelmed or retraumatised. We work at a pace that feels manageable.
Duration
How long therapy takes depends on what you’re working on, the complexity of your difficulties, and your goals. Some people achieve significant change within a few weeks; others benefit from longer-term work extending over a period of months. We’ll discuss expectations around duration and regularly review your progress.
Practical Information
Location and Format
I offer both online therapy (via secure, encrypted video) and in-person sessions at my practice in Faringdon, Oxfordshire. Most clients find online therapy convenient and just as effective as face-to-face sessions. We can discuss which format might suit you during the initial consultation.
Fees
We can discuss fees during our first conversation, with no obligation to proceed. I will always be clear about my expectations for duration and cost of treatment and there is never any pressure to continue with therapy.
Confidentiality
What you discuss in therapy remains confidential (except in specific and rare circumstances, such as where there is a safeguarding concern). What is shared in the therapy room stays in the room.
Who Therapy Might Help
Psychotherapy can benefit people facing:
- Anxiety disorders, panic attacks, phobias, health anxiety
- Depression, persistent low mood, suicidal thoughts
- Relationship difficulties, patterns of unsatisfying relationships
- Trauma, PTSD, effects of past abuse
- Bereavement, grief, loss
- Life transitions, identity struggles, existential questions
- Low self-esteem, chronic self-criticism
- Stress, burnout, overwhelming life demands
- Anger management difficulties
- Emotional regulation challenges
- Adjustment to illness, disability, or life changes
It’s important to remember that therapy isn’t only for severe mental health conditions, it’s also valuable for personal growth, self-understanding, and creating more satisfying life patterns.
Getting Started
If you’re considering psychotherapy, the next step is to get in touch. Click the button below, email me at support@garybloom.co.uk, or call me on 07860 77 2023 to arrange an initial consultation. We can meet online or in person in Faringdon, Oxfordshire, depending on your preference.
Taking the step to seek therapy requires courage — acknowledging that you need support, making yourself vulnerable to a stranger, committing time and resources to psychological work. That courage is often the hardest part. Once you’re in the therapeutic relationship, the work, while sometimes challenging, happens in a safe, confidential, non-judgmental space designed specifically to support your wellbeing and growth.
I look forward to hearing from you.