Hi, I’m Dr Simone
A highly specialised and multi-qualified therapist with over twenty-five years experience of working with trauma
ABOUT SIMONE
Hi, I’m Simone
I’m a Chartered Counselling Psychologist and qualified nutritionist specialising in eating problems, identity and relationships. I have worked in the NHS but now practice privately. I have a deep understanding of eating disorder recovery, both personally and professionally. It’s not unusual for practitioners to specialise in areas they have had personal experience of, and having struggled an eating disorder myself, I bring not only clinical expertise but also lived insight into what recovery can mean and feel like.
My approach is systemic, anti-oppressive, feminist and combines trauma-informed therapy, EMDR, polyvagal, schema and emotion-focused work, and evidence-based nutrition to help you make sense of problems, and build a healthy relationship with food, body, and self.
I am the first born daughter to working class teenage parents, I am Gen X and like many therapists, my training ground was my family of origin. I was my family’s first university student and choosing psychology was no random act – I sought clarity, of myself, and others. I may have been a curious kind of person regardless, but alas, we meaning make through story, and that was mine. I was a creative, socially awkward kid, and in my head a lot. Now I practice embodiment, actively reject multi-tasking, and consider what I can contribute to the world, rather than what the world might try to take from me.
My speciality is seeing the systems that operate to keep us stuck, or reveal routes to healing. My expertise spans trauma therapy, somatic approaches, reflective gender care, and decolonising psychology and I offer therapy to young people, individuals, couples, families, friends, others clinicians, and organisations to cultivate nuanced, contextually-informed care. My work is grounded in embracing complexity, imperfection, nuance, context and what we share, rather than what keeps us apart. It is explicitly political, inclusive, and every session, whether it’s you alone or with your partner, holds your individual experience and social/cultural context.
Over the last twenty five years, along with a Master of Science in Nutrition and Behaviour, and a Professional Doctorate in Counselling Psychology, I have trained and practiced as a sports therapist, personal trainer and yoga therapist. My personal experience with sport and anorexia, combined with my trainings led me to specialise in eating disorders, complex trauma and relationships. This doesn’t mean I don’t work with other common concerns, but that where eating and relationships are concerned, I bring specific nuance.
I am an embodied therapist, and my work sits at the intersection of trauma, embodiment, gender, and cultural analysis.
I developed Reflective, Embodied Gender Care™ as a therapeutic and educational model that brings critical realism, post-structural gender theory, trans epistemology, and relational neuroscience into contemporary psychological practice. It is a best practice road-map for gender affirming care that is applicable for people both in, and outside of the binary.
Read some of the testimonials for recommendations if you like. You’ll find me authentic, direct, compassionate, and hopefully pretty funny sometimes, as the line between Simone the real and Dr Simone the therapist is wafer thin. I value genuine connections and I believe that if I show up genuinely, then this invites my clients to be as real as they feel safe to be. To some degree there is an element of this being cultivated along the way, but my style is to be real with you, from to start. I meet you at your humanity and I am unlikely to be shocked by anything you tell me. I am not a ‘neutral’ faced therapist, nor will I sit in silence whilst I wait for you to ‘open up’.
Our therapeutic relationship is the crucible for change, so I invite you into a relational therapeutic space that offers an expansive, contextual, systemic lens on your suffering. I don’t believe psychological suffering is an individual defect. It is produced in bodies by systems of power; gender, coloniality, capitalism, cissexism, class, race, and the messages that tell us who we should be and what bodies are allowed to signify. In a safe, sacred therapy space we can explore this, and routes to healing.
The tools for this healing, are Schema Therapy – because it organises experience well, and I enjoy the visual representations of parts work as I am a more visual learner myself. I also use Emotionally Focussed Therapy, because it helps me focus on deepening the emotions in session for my clients, who have often skimmed over their own experience for whatever reason, and might not have given themselves the care, time and space they deserved. I will use EMDR and/or polyvagal strategies to process trauma (big and little T) and I draw from my work with exercise and yoga to help bring a somatic lens to the work.
I might integrate nutrition science, metabolism and my lived experience where appropriate – feminist therapists will use the art of skillful self-disclosure where it might help you. This is where I believe I bring a distinct advantage to the work, my lived experience and because of my interest in understanding trauma, and lived histories of power shape how and why we eat and move the way we do, and how we move and eat, shapes how we feel. This is invaluable when it comes to understanding how trauma interrupts the gut-brain axis, food selection, nutrient absorption and metabolism. Ultimately, I am an ’embodied therapist’, and despite being primarily online, I am always inviting my clients to be embodied with me and to notice what’s going on inside. For this, attunement and honestly, instinct is my major tool.
I qualified as a nutritionist with an MSc (hons) Nutrition and Behaviour (Association for Nutrition). I have a Professional Doctorate in Counselling Psychology to qualify as a Chartered Counselling Psychologist registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC). Others trainings I have attended include, Schema Therapy for eating disorders, Emotionally Focussed Couples Therapy, Sports Therapy Diploma level 5, Personal Training Diploma – Team Bath, British Wheel of Yoga Teaching Diploma, Intuitive Eating Practitioner Training with Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole, and I am currently training as an EMDR practitioner. I worked in the NHS for nearly five years in psychological therapies and eating disorder services and now I work exclusively privately.
I have a dog, Suki (shit tzu). My day begins with properly made coffee, and my best day would involve walking somewhere in nature. Personally I take an absurdist kind of philosophy to life. That is, I don’t believe there is meaning, rather that we create meaning with language in an absurdly incoherent and increasingly chaotic world.
I am interested in how psychology can act as a force for cultivating more compassion, complexity, humanity and relationality in a world that seems increasingly divisive. I am a feminist therapist in this pursuit because we need to understand the broader overarching systems we live within, in order to understand the distress this produces. Patriarchy, and specifically post-colonial, Capitalist patriarchy, trains people, especially men but not only men, to believe that:
- their experience is the “default,”
- their perspective is the neutral ground
- strength equates to invulnerability
- dominance is superior
- emotional suppression is control
- heterosexual legitimacy is the standard
This system teaches us something about what it means to be a man or woman that fails us in relationships when we become adults. We don’t heal in isolation from culture. Most relational struggles, and a shocking number of eating disorders are shaped by gender ideals that reward self-erasure, emotional suppression, and chronic over-functioning. Patriarchy scripts who gets to have needs, who is allowed vulnerability, whose anger is valid, whose body must stay small, and who must stay invulnerable. These are not “individual issues.” They’re inherited relational blueprints. Therapy that ignores gendered power dynamics ends up pathologising the person rather than the system. Real intimacy begins when those scripts get dismantled and when two humans can show up without performing the versions of masculinity or femininity they were trained to embody.
This is the work. Masculinity and femininity are regulated through punishment, shame, and threat. So when I state my feminist perspective, I allow myself to be identified as anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial and that I seek to disrupt the illusion that partial viewpoints are objective facts, and that I locate distress where appropriate, within this system.
How this comes across is hopefully, with care, patience, firmness and skill. I ask: how can we unfold towards one another? What How can we cultivate curiosity through fear? How can we tolerate one another’s madness and bare the costs of relationships to enjoy true intimacy?
I believe that where we expend energy, expands. I put energy into connection, to self and others, rest, creativity, reading, writing, learning, joy, nature, playfulness, courage, breath, the senses, imagination and acceptance.
THERAPY CAN HELP ENRICH YOUR RELATIONSHIPS
IF YOU’RE STRUGGLING TO CONNECT WITH YOURSELF OR OTHERS
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