Haline Schendan

Available for new clients.

I offer sessions online via Zoom.

Each session lasts 50 minutes.

Would you like to experience yourself, life, and relationships with feelings of calm, happiness, and aliveness? I put you and your perspectives, feelings, goals, and experiences first. Together, we consider what has happened to you within your social, cultural, and lifetime context, and what this means to you. Together, we find the path to change your life as best suits who you feel and think you are as a whole person.

My approach is to work with memories of past experiences to change them using evidence-based practice. As a learning and memory neuroscientist, I broadly, deeply understand how the brain becomes wired and how this wiring can affect us and our lives in ways that can sometimes make life seem difficult. I know how to change this wiring. These changes can improve feelings and experiences of yourself and your life.

My approach is also ‘attachment and trauma-focused’. However, events experienced psychologically as somehow traumatic are not just due to big events, such as war. Events that result in lasting seemingly traumatic memories can originally have been any threatening situation that produced overwhelming feelings and distressing memories that continue to affect us, even months or years afterwards. Science recently revealed how those memories are created and can be changed. These insights lie at the centre of my approach to working with you.

I also specialize in working with people who describe themselves as highly sensitive.

About me

Personal: I have international, multi-ethnic and multicultural experience and background. I am mixed race American.

Professional: Besides being a BACP-registered psychotherapist, I am in my final year as a Trainee Counselling Psychologist, and I have been an academic neuroscientist, specializing in brain imaging of vision, learning and memory. I have dedicated my life to applying neuroscience to improve human life. In the NHS, I worked with diverse psychological difficulties ranging from mild to complex and long-standing.

Would you like more happiness, play and calm in your life? Do you long for more fulfilment in your life and relationships?

Do you find yourself overwhelmed and seeking relief from stimulation? Have you felt stressed, anxious or low? Have you felt stuck, unable to move forward with your life, to pursue wishes, dreams and wants, as you believe is possible and yet somehow this doesn’t happen? Have you felt numb, empty or don’t know what you want, yet know how things are isn’t what you want? Have you felt detached or separated from yourself, others, the world or reality? Have you felt that your relationships could be better? As a clinician and research with a long career in neuroscience of learning and memory, I can help you change as you wish to fulfill your potential, improving your life and relationships.

Have you or others considered you to be sensitive or shy? As a clinician and researcher specialized in high sensitivity, I am passionate about helping the highly sensitive person. I do so by helping you understand sensitivity and to learn to take advantage of being sensitive to change your life in ways that foster resilience, positive experiences and enjoyment.

I welcome people with any background and history and all intersectionalities (e.g., LGBTQ+, race, ages). I offer a non-judgmental and non-pathologizing space for everyone.

Specializations: Relationship difficulties, sensitivity, insecure attachment, abuse, neglect, trauma, PTSD, complex-PTSD, dissociation

My work is integrative, drawing upon the following:

Therapeutic modalities. Cognitive behavioral therapy, relational psychodynamic therapy, person-centred experiential therapy, humanistic therapy, systemic/family therapy, creative arts therapies (e.g., psychodrama).

Therapeutic methods. Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (J. Fisher), Internal Family Systems, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, attachment-focused EMDR, Mindfulness, Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy

In the first 50-minute session, you can tell me about yourself and your goals for therapy, get to know me and ask questions. This will help you decide if we are a good match to work together.

In our initial sessions, I may ask you to complete standardized questionnaires and return them beforehand. This information will be used to help us decide how we can best work together to meet your goals for therapy.

If you have any questions or want to get to know me before the first session, I offer a free, 15 minute consultation over the phone or online via Zoom.

If you have insurance, I can apply to register with your insurer.

Qualifications:

MBACP

Trainee Counselling Psychologist, City, University of London (final year)

PhD in Cognitive Science and Neurosciences, UCSD (The use of the title Dr in this directory listing relates to the member’s doctorate qualification. However, this does not imply a general medical qualification.)

MSc in Neurosciences, UCSD

BA in Neurobiology, UCB