Deborah Mckay

I offer relational psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy to individuals and couples.  I have availability during the week and some evenings.  I work both online and in person.  

Relationships - with ourselves and with others - are at the heart of everything I do.  I'm Deborah, a counsellor and psychotherapist working with individuals and couples in Clapham, South London and online across the UK.  I trained at the internationally-renowned Tavistock Relationships and I work with people facing relational difficulties, and those living with anxiety, depression or a sense that something in their inner life needs attention.  

At the core of my practice is a simple conviction: how we relate to others and to ourselves- shapes everything.  Two people in a relationship co-create something with real potential for a rich rewarding life, but also for many difficulties. This is especially true when the unfinished business of the past finds its way into the present.  When this happens a safe, authentic and contained therapeutic relationship can support people to slow down and to work through what each of them brings to the quality of the relationship.  With curiosity the hope is that people become less stuck and connection and communication improves.  However, sometimes a couple may realise that the relationship needs to change or end and therapy can support this process with the aim of supporting this process in the most compassionate way possible.  

For individuals relationships can also be a source of both joy and stress.  The therapeutic space can provide a non-judgmental space to explore together why a person may find it difficult to give or receive love and, when appropriate, how their past may be influencing their choice of partner and how they respond in relationship with another.   Alternatively an important relationship may have ended, or a new one started, and a person may find it helpful to think about how they now want to show up and connect with another/others. 

Before my clinical training, I spent many years as a broadcast journalist and communications advisor, working internationally. I learnt the quiet power of sitting alongside people and bearing witness, sometimes in the most challenging circumstances.  I also know how much life can ask of us and that the human capacity for transformation - for finding a different relationship with ourselves/our lives - is genuinely remarkable, and rarely as out of reach as it feels.

My practice is rooted in the psychodynamic tradition - a way of working that understands real change as something that happens from the inside out, within a therapeutic relationship that is safe, authentic and genuinely collaborative.

My style is warm and direct, and I work interactively - this is not a passive process.  I bring genuine curiosity to every person and every relationship I work with.

I work with a wide range of individuals and couples - including same sex couples, people navigating new relationships after divorce or bereavement, and couples trying to find their way back to each other after an affair or serious breakdown of trust.  I have a particular interest in attachment - in why we choose the partners we do, what we bring from our earliest relationships into our adult ones, and what becomes possible when those patterns are finally understood.

Individual sessions are 50 minutes; couples sessions run between 50 minutes and an hour and a half.  We meet at the same time and at the same place every week - a consistency that may sound like a small detail but is quietly central to the work itself.

I know that reaching out takes courage.  The free 15 minute consultation is a chance to ask questions and to get a sense of whether working together feels right with no obligation either way. 

Relationships - including therapeutic ones - need time to find their footing.  In our first sessions I will largely be listening: to your story, to what has brought you here, to the life that preceded this moment.  I am never in a hurry.  The work unfolds at your pace.

I'll want to know about your early world - your family of origin, your first attachments, the experiences that left their mark long before you were able to make sense of them.  Who loved you, and how.  Who wasn't there, or couldn't quite reach you. What you learned, early on about whether the world was safe and whether you were worthy of care. 

For couples, the early sessions have a different quality.  I am listening to both or you - but I'm also listening to what happens between you.  The dynamic that plays out in the room, often tells me a great deal about the dynamic that brings you to therapy.  Very often, what feels like a problem between two people turns out to be two histories colliding - and that understanding alone can begin to shift something. 

My role is not to take sides, to arbitrate or tell you what to do.  It is to help you hear each other - perhaps for the first time - and to find a way of being together that feels more honest, more spacious and more sustaining.