Tamala Twigg

My availability is a little limited at the moment — ordinarily I work Monday to Thursday, 10am to 7pm.

Face to face, Monday to Wednesday, finishing at 5pm.

Online, over secure Zoom, I’ve a bit more room to work with — any of those four days, right through to 7pm.

If a particular day or time works better for you, just ask; I’ll do what I can to match it.

I’m a trustee for a domestic abuse charity and sit on the committee of another. That means active, ongoing work — not theoretical familiarity — with police, IDVAs, ISVAs, local services, and community partners. The majority of my clinical work is with complex trauma and C-PTSD, much of it rooted in domestic abuse, coercive control, and the long aftermath of relationships that gradually redefined what felt normal.

I also work regularly with neurodivergent clients, and that’s not a footnote. It changes how I pace sessions, how I explain things, and what progress looks like — because that looks genuinely different for different people. You don’t need to mask, manage yourself. Come as you are.

Clinically, I work within what I actually know — and I’m honest about the edges of that. If something is outside my competence, I’ll say so clearly, and I’ll help you find the right person where I can.

The way I work draws on three approaches — and each one does something distinct.

Psychodynamic therapy looks at what’s underneath. Not in a distant or abstract way — in the very practical sense of: why does this keep happening? Why does this feeling show up here, in this situation, with this person? Patterns that feel baffling in the present often make a lot more sense when we can see where they started.

Person-centred therapy is less a technique and more a stance. You’re the expert on your own experience. My job isn’t to interpret it for you or hand you a neat explanation. It’s to be genuinely present with you while you figure it out — without an agenda, without a hierarchy of what counts as a real problem, without judgement about how you got here.

And then there’s IFS — Internal Family Systems — which is where a lot of the most meaningful work tends to happen, and something I find genuinely exciting. The premise is that most of us aren’t one single, consistent person. We’re made up of parts. The part that wants things to change and the part that’s quietly terrified of what change might cost. The part that’s angry and the part that’s ashamed of being angry. The part that longs for connection and the part that shuts down the moment someone gets close enough to matter. The part that’s been holding everything together for years and is absolutely exhausted.

IFS doesn’t try to silence those parts or argue them out of existence. It gets curious about them — what they’ve been protecting, how long they’ve been doing it, what they might be able to put down if they felt safe enough to try. Most of the parts that feel like the problem have been trying to help for a very long time. That shift — from fighting yourself to understanding yourself — is often where things start to genuinely move.

The work is trauma-informed throughout. Safety, choice, and collaboration aren’t things I say — they’re how sessions actually run. You decide what we go into and when. You set the pace.

A first session doesn’t go straight for the heaviest thing in the room.

We’ll start with what’s brought you here, what’s been difficult, what you’re hoping might shift. There’ll be some questions — background, history, previous therapy if that’s part of your experience — but you decide what you’re ready to go into. Nothing needs to come out before it’s ready. Bring whatever you’ve got — messy thoughts, uncertainty, not knowing where to start. There’s no right way to show up.

We’ll go through the practical things clearly too: confidentiality and where its limits are, how we’d work together, what you can expect from me. All of it upfront, so nothing catches you out later. If you’ve got questions — about my approach, whether I’ve worked with situations like yours, whether this feels like a good fit — ask them. I’d rather you left the first session clearer than when you arrived.

The first session is mostly about getting to know each other. We’ll talk about what’s brought you to therapy, what’s felt difficult, and what you’re hoping might be different. There’s no agenda beyond that — no assessment to pass, nothing to have prepared. It’s the beginning of figuring out, together, what this work could look like for you.