“I’m not the type of person who needs help; never have been. I’ve always been the coper, the one who holds it all together. So it was horrifying for me to accept that I couldn’t cope, that I needed to be signed off work with anxiety and depression and I was going to need help. This happened just over 2 years ago, following a really tough time at work I admitted defeat – I didn’t have much choice; I started to cry one day and couldn’t stop.

I found myself sitting in front of Esra with no idea how this was going to help me. But help it did, and over the following 2 years I’ve changed the way I approach most things, I think about why I react to things the way that I do and am able to over-ride some of the ingrained responses that I have.

I am now off the anti-depressants that I needed as a short-term fix and am moving on with my life. I don’t think I would have got here without someone to talk to, someone to ask the right questions, and someone to challenge what I thought was how life worked. This is what Esra did for me, and I am truly grateful.”

“After struggling to cope with certain aspects of my life I made the decision, with some trepidation, to find a counsellor to help me make sense of my feelings and hopefully reduce the overwhelming anxiety I often suffered from.

Although I often found it difficult to talk about how I was feeling, Esra very quickly helped me to think about my reactions to certain situations, the reasons behind them and to consider alternatives. I visited Esra for the best part of a year, varying the frequency depending on my needs, and by the end of that time I felt that I had the tools to be able to recognize developing situations and to make my own choice in how I dealt with them.

I found the process very empowering and I know that if I find myself faced with further problems in future I can call on Esra to help me resolve them”

“A little over a year ago I found myself in a bad place, with regular bouts of severe depression, and not knowing, with any clarity, the reason for them. I knew I needed to find help.

I was highly recommended to go to Esra, and I booked a trial session with her. I liked what I found, and continued with weekly sessions for 5 months.
She didn’t ‘cure’ me; she didn’t tell me what my problems were. What she did was vastly better and more valuable than that. She helped me to discover for myself the darker regions in my head. She enabled me to realise the reasons for my lack of self-esteem, which I had previously lived with for many years.

As a result of this amazing enabling process, I have discovered a new, more confident and more creative me.

It is with great pleasure that I would like to commend Esra’s skills to anyone who feels they could benefit from psychotherapy.”