Life transitions therapy for the chapters in between.
For the disorientation between who you were and who you are becoming, when the old shape of life has loosened and the new one has not yet arrived.
Some life transitions arrive with a date in the diary. Others creep up over years, until you look up one day and find the person you were no longer fits the life you have, or the life you have no longer fits the person you have become. Both are real. Both can quietly destabilise.
Most of the people I see for transitions are not in crisis. They are functioning, often well. What they are looking for is somewhere to think, slowly and honestly, about what is shifting underneath, before they make decisions they cannot easily undo.
The hardest part of a transition is not the change itself. It is the period in between, when you have left who you were and not yet arrived at who you will be.
How the work goes
The event on the surface, the self underneath.
Life transitions therapy is rarely only about the event itself. The career change, the empty house, the milestone birthday, the loss, are the visible part. Underneath, what is happening is quieter and more important: an identity is loosening, a set of assumptions is being questioned, a way of being in the world is no longer sufficient.
The work moves at both layers. We attend to the practical decisions you are weighing and the conversations you are about to have. And we make space for the deeper question that transitions tend to ask: who are you now, and what is this period of your life actually for.
Areas I work with
Where this work tends to focus.
Specific transitions clients bring. Each is a starting point, not a category.
Career and work in flux
Leaving a role you have outgrown. Stepping into seniority and finding it lonelier than expected. Redundancy, restructuring, retirement. The slower version: still in post, but no longer present. The realisation that the career you spent twenty years building is no longer the one you want, and not knowing what comes next.
What surfaces is rarely only about work. It is about identity, status, and the question that follows when the role you have been holding stops holding you back.
Becoming a parent, returning to work, the empty nest
The arrival of a child reorganises a life in ways no one quite prepares you for, and the question it asks is often left unspoken: who am I now, and what happened to the version of me that existed before. Returning to work after maternity or paternity leave is its own kind of transition, particularly the gap between the professional self you were and the one you have become.
Years later, the empty nest brings the inverse question. The role that organised your last two decades has stepped back, and what rises in the space it leaves is sometimes relief, sometimes grief, often both.
Midlife and the questions it brings
Midlife is rarely the cliched crisis. More often it is a slow, private re-evaluation: a sense that the first half of life was about building, and the second half is asking different questions. What still matters. What you have postponed. What you would no longer accept. Menopause and andropause add their own layer, and these are years that often arrive with ageing parents, growing children, and a quiet recalibration of what you want the next decades to be for.
Loss, grief, and bereavement
The death of someone close changes the structure of your life in ways that go well beyond the immediate grief. Identity itself shifts: you are no longer a daughter, no longer a husband, no longer the person who phoned every Sunday. Therapy holds space for the grief itself, and for the slower work of finding who you are in the world the loss has left behind.
And there is the loss of health, of a future you assumed you would have, or of a country, when life abroad has lasted longer than the homesickness took to lift.
The transitions that did not happen
Sometimes the hardest transitions are the ones that never arrived. The marriage that did not happen. The children you did not have. The career you stepped back from. The life you imagined at twenty-five that never quite materialised. These are real losses, and they often go unmourned because there is no clear event to grieve, no language for what is missing.
Therapy is a place to make these losses visible, to grieve what was not, and to think about what your life can still become.
Common questions
Things people often ask.
Is what I’m going through really significant enough for therapy?
People often arrive apologetically, comparing their difficulties to harder ones and concluding they should not need help. The clinical reality is the opposite: transitions that go unmourned and unprocessed are often the ones that quietly shape the next decade. You do not need a crisis to come to therapy. The work is more useful, and usually shorter, when it begins before things have fully unravelled.
How long does life transitions therapy take?
It depends on what you are working with. Some transitions need focused work over three to six months, particularly when the event is recent and the question is clear. Others are deeper reorientations, where the transition has surfaced longer-standing patterns, and a longer course of therapy is more useful. We talk about it as we go, and you are always free to end whenever you choose.
How is this different from coaching?
Coaching tends to focus on goals, decisions, and forward action. It is useful and can complement therapy, but it works at the surface of the transition. Therapy works at the layer underneath: the identity questions, the inherited templates, the parts of you the change has destabilised. Both have their place. For transitions that feel deeper than the situation alone explains, therapy is usually more useful.
Can we work online if I’m not in London?
Yes. I see clients online by secure video across the UK, in English or Deutsch. Online therapy is broadly as effective as in-person therapy for transitions work, and many clients find it easier to fit into a life that is already in flux. In-person sessions are also available at my Wimbledon practice.
Further reading
Pieces from the Library.
Get in touch
Curious if we’d be a good fit?
I offer a free 15-minute initial conversation, online or by phone. A chance for us both to think together about whether my way of working would suit what you’re looking for.