HOLISTIC SUPPORT TO HELP YOU THRIVE

Online talking therapy services based in London

English & Spanish Spoken

To book an appointment, please email me

or complete the contact form below.

“The type of person you wish you were is the person you really are, but haven’t yet learned to be..”

Get in touch.

Services Offered

  • Counselling

    Short-term mental health support

  • Psychotherapy

    Long-term regular psychotherapy for clients who want to work at a deeper level

  • Hypnotherapy

    Hypnotherapy is a complementary therapy used for the management of general, social and performance anxiety, panic attacks, stress, unhealthy habits, self-esteem problems, and much more.

  • Holistic Coaching

    An integrative holistic coaching support to overcome life challenges

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What are you struggling with?

  • Relationships

    Toxic & unhealthy patterns

    Recovery from abusive / narcissistic relationships

    Problems to find or attract a partner

    Difficulties to overcome a break-up

    Recovering from separation / divorce

    Support to manage the dating process

    Feeling lonely

    Problems to set appropriate and healthy boundaries

  • Anxiety

    General Anxiety

    Social Anxiety

    Health Anxiety

    Performance Anxiety

    Exam anxiety

    Panic attacks

    Phobias

    Nightmares & Night Terrors

    Stress

  • Low Mood & Depresssion

    Feeling Low

    Lack of Motivation

    Procrastination

    Loss

    Bereavement

    Grief

    Regret

    Trauma

  • Confidence

    Low self-esteem

    Lack of self-worth

    Lack of self-confidence

    Feeling worthless

    Trust in Self

    Self-doubt

    Shame

    Guilt

    Poor self-image

    People-pleasing

  • Spirituality

    Issues arising from spiritual beliefs

    Spiritual abuse

    Recovery from coercive groups

    Experiences related to your spiritual awakening

    Spiritually Transformative Experiences

    Spiritual Emergence /Emergencies

    Traumatic Anomalous Experiences

    Past life Regression

    Soul Retrieval

    Dissolving/ Untying Energetic Knots

    Renegotiating Spiritual Contracts

  • Counselling for Students

    We offer counselling for students of counselling and university students.

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”

— Rumi

When you are not feeling ok, it is perfectly ok to ask for help.

Life is becoming increasingly more complex and difficult to navigate. The demands of modern life leave very little space for us to find time to connect with what really matters.

We are always busy, our minds preoccupied with an endless stream of information that saturates our senses and leaves us feeling depleted and at risk of developing mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression. 

We lose touch with our inner desires and forget that we have needs that require attention. 

Not being able to meet our needs, or those of the people we love, we turn to distractions to numb the pain. We disconnect from our body, because this is the only way to escape painful emotions.

This alienation from ourselves has terrible consequences for our mental and physical health, and our relationships to others, to society and the planet.

This disconnection is then used by others to manipulate us into ways of thinking and behaving that disconnects even further from ourselves causing a split in our consciousness. We compartmentalise our experiences, moving through life like zombies, not really being present in the moment, but like watching our life pass us by through a window.

The “mental health” crisis is partly a consequence of feelings of alienation. A person that feels alienated feels a disconnection from themself and from others, and they are often pathologized, becoming the “abnormal” in a society where insanity is normalised.

Perhaps you are having any of the following experiences?

  • are struggling to cope with the increasing demands of modern life, feeling stressed and overwhelmed.

  • are feeling stuck, like a hamster in a wheel, trying to catch your breath, going around in endless circles, unable to move forward, as if you were trapped in an invisible cage.

  • are feeling anxious about the present and uncertain about the future, increasingly fearful of the future, and of change.

  • are feeling lost, unable to motivate yourself to get things done, to start new projects, to meet new people.

  • are feeling despondent about the world, and trying to stave off a sense of helplessness and hopelessness that threatens to engulf you.

  • are feeling angry, and with this comes a feeling of shame and guilt, so you have internalised your anger, leaving you feeling depressed, unable to connect with your emotions.

  • feel “too much” and, to drown those feelings, you distract yourself with whatever makes those feelings go away. You find relief for a while, but it is never enough to make those feelings go entirely away.

  • have some abstract sense that much more is possible for your life but when you look at reality, all you see is a big gap between who you are and who you would like to be and you have no idea how to bridge that gap.

“Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society.”

-Thomas Stephen Szasz

How can talking to a therapist help me?

A therapist, like myself, has trained for a long time to learn to help people who are suffering and struggling to cope. This means that we can guide you to bring clarity to your experiences. Clarity will lead you to understand what you need to do, which will lead to change. 

Change may come in many ways. Initially the change may simply be that you are becoming more aware of your response to events. You may begin to notice how you feel, and learn to identify and name emotions. You may learn to notice your thoughts, or thinking pattern. You may notice how you behave in certain situations or with certain people. You may notice how your body responds to certain situations or people. This is the first step to change.

The therapist may ask you to describe events in your life, which may take you to explore your past, and your meaningful relationships. This may bring awareness of the origin of your problems.

Sometimes, this stage of therapy becomes very painful, and many people resist to “go there”. That’s fine, there is no rush. Good therapy will never push you to go where you don’t want to, or where you do not feel ready.

Good therapy will respect your wishes, and will check with you often with questions like “how are you feeling as you talk about this?”, “what is going for you as you remember that incident in your life?”, “how are we doing ?”.

You are an active participant, and you and your therapist collaborate in the work.

Sometimes, people decide they do not want to continue therapy because they are “feeling worse”. It is true, that in some cases, due to the complexity of your problems or trauma, you may feel that you are not “progressing” or that you are not “feeling as you thought you would”. This usually happens because there is a lot of pain “there” and you are not ready to face that and walk through that. That is fine. Your life is not a race. However, if you leave therapy at this stage, you may find that, in time, the original symptoms come back, or the patterns repeats itself again…and you may feel that therapy “has not worked for you”.

Sometimes, the popular saying “it gets darker before the dawn” is so true in therapeutic work.

Therapy is about learning to cope better, to manage thoughts, feelings and behaviours with greater self-awareness and understanding. This helps us understand situations and people, and our response to these. As we learn to respond differently to the same triggers; as we learn to identify patterns and steer them off, we begin to create a new reality. We make different choices and these choices lead to a different place.

Depending on what you bring to the therapy, you may have more or less work to do on yourself. It is important to understand though, that the therapist does not work miracles. Your engagement with the sessions and your commitment to yourself are key to bring about change in your life.

And like any relationship, without commitment, sometimes it is hard to see results but if you are brave and bold, and forge ahead, you will reach your goals.

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”


― William Hutchison Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

“How do you work?”

Clients often ask me: “how do you work?”.

It is a simple and at the same time, a very difficult question to answer!

I could start explaining about the approaches to counselling and psychotherapy, but unless you know about this, it is all pure jargon. 

The thing is that therapy is an emergent process. This means that neither you nor I can anticipate what will happen in the therapeutic space when we work together. What happens is an emerging process, that develops as our relationship develops and our ability to work together at depth.

This requires commitment to show up on the part of the client. As a therapist, I am already committed to you from the moment we agree to work together. 

As I am an Integrative practitioner, I can adapt to my clients' needs.

In general, my sessions are conversational. Our sessions will be an interaction between you and me, and I will feedback to you as I consider it therapeutically relevant. 

Sometimes, I will listen to you to allow you to explore your thoughts and emotions. 

Sometimes, I will ask you questions that allow you to explore even further.

 Sometimes, my questions will challenge you, and that's ok. 

Sometimes, I will give information to help you make sense of your experience. 

I work in a way that respects your process but also, in a way that empowers you to create your own space.

After all, therapy should be about being able to create a space you can call your own, within the relationship with your therapist, where you can feel safe to explore and to test new ways of thinking and feeling, and where you can report what it was like to behave differently in your every day life. ​

I am an Integrative Counsellor, also qualified as a Clinical Hypnotherapist, and I have been a practising Life Coach for many years. My approach combines principles of the humanistic and  psychodynamic schools.  I also integrate certain CBT approaches that work well with these approaches. In addition, and when appropriate, I use guided meditations, clinical hypnosis, and psycho-imaginative techniques to help my clients to get a better understanding and clarity of their situation, and personal challenges.

“What are we going to do in the sessions?”

In therapy, we will look at your story, and at what you have been believing within that story. We will decide what you want to focus on, where you feel you can make changes and develop yourself, and together, within the safe space of our relationship, we will work together to create a new story for you. 

In counselling we may work on:

  • Helping you to get clarity about your situation.

  • Practising how to access the internal and external resources that will catalyse your healing and transformation.

  • Helping you to make distinctions between what is your “stuff” and what is “other people’s stuff”. By “stuff” we mean psychological baggage.

  • Helping you to own your stuff, and to work through it. This understanding will lead to more choice, and therefore, more freedom to create a new story for yourself.

  • Identifying your strengths and nurturing your psychological, emotional and spiritual resilience.

  • Getting clarity about the beliefs that are holding you back so that you can evolve those beliefs and replace them with life-affirming ones.

  • Exploring life-enhancing, soul-nurturing, self-enriching beliefs and values.

  • Improving your assertiveness and communication skills.

  • Learning psychologically healthy attitudes and skills.

These are some of the examples of what we can do in the therapy.

I work in a holistic way, and if appropriate, we can work with hypnosis and guided imagery, to access a deeper knowledge about your situation. 

If you are spiritually-minded, we can work together with this area of your life, to get clarity about your experiences and the deeper meaning of these in your life.

You are not ready to book a consultation yet?

That’s ok. Follow your gut. You can start by reading my blog (coming soon)

You need to know more about what to expect from sessions.

That’s ok. Read the different sections on the website to get a feel of what to expect for each modality. Make sure you read the FAQ below!

FAQs

I am interested. How do I book an appointment?

Send me an email ( contact@minervatherapy.co.uk ). Let me know your name, age and a brief, general description of your problem and what you need. I will reply to you within 48 hours and we can arrange to have our first session.

What is your availability?

My current availability for sessions is Mondays and Tuesdays. Occasionally, Saturday and /or Sunday mornings. The earliest session is at 8 am and the latest at 7 pm.

Do you offer a free consultation session?

I offer a consultation session but it is not free. We arrange to book a full 60 minute session. With this one (hopefully, first consultation) session, I can learn about you and your problem, and assess whether I can help you. I can also gather the information I need to know to make a proposal to you. You can also get a real feel of what it would be like to work with me.

How long is the session?

The consultation session is 60 minutes (1 hour).

The duration of the subsequent sessions depends on the modality you are looking for (counselling/psychotherapy, hypnotherapy or coaching). For example, hypnotherapy sessions are usually 90 min. Counselling /therapy is 60 min and Coaching will vary (60-90 min). In the first consultation session, we will discuss your needs and goals and based on that, I will make a proposal to you.

Do you work online only?

I work mostly online. We can arrange face-to-face session if you agree to have a minimum of three months (12 sessions) and pay your sessions in advance, on the 1st of each month.

How much are the sessions?

The first consultation session is £60 and it lasts 60 minutes. This gives time to discuss your problem, what you hope to achieve, and for me to explain how I work and give you a proposal.

The fee for subsequent sessions depends on a number of factors:

  1. The modality of work you would prefer

  2. The frequency of the sessions

  3. The duration of the sessions

  4. Your problem and what you hope to achieve.

  5. Whether more is required on my part, for example, to prepare scripts for hypnotherapy, research your problem, do meditations about your situation, etc. This depends on the modality of work you choose.

  6. Whether sessions will be face-to-face or online

  7. Whether you will need intensive sessions (several days per week or on the weekend, for example).

Generally, the fee is between £60 - £150. Concessions are negotiable subjected to evidence of income, and your individual circumstances.

“What if I cannot afford the sessions?”

No problem, we will discuss this in our consultation session. I may offer concessions based on individual circumstances. I will also be organising group therapy and group coaching sessions as well as courses. You are welcome to join these. Make sure you sign up for updates.

Concessions are offered for counselling students, university students, people with disabilities and pensioners (you will need to provide evidence and/or proof of income).

“Do you offer sessions in another language?”

I speak fluent Spanish and conversational French. I offer sessions in Spanish. If you are French, I would also understand your culture but my French is not good enough to have session in that language.