Most people wait far too long before they ring a therapist.
You do not need to wait until everything feels unmanageable. Most people reach out after a long time trying to cope on their own. Therapy is a space to pause, make sense of what you are carrying, and understand the patterns keeping you stuck.
I am Soraya, an integrative therapist. I see adults online, once a week, for fifty minutes.
Soraya McLellan BSc (Hons)
Diploma in Counselling & Psychotherapy
Registered Member of the BACP.
Adults, online, UK wide · Evenings and weekends
Some of what people bring
Worry that seems to follow you through the day and is still there when you are trying to sleep.
A sense of flatness or disconnection that is difficult to explain, but becoming harder to ignore.
Something that happened recently, or many years ago, that you have carried quietly and never quite found the words for.
Finding yourself drinking or using more than you intended, again, and beginning to wonder why stopping feels so difficult.
Recognising the same arguments, disappointments or relationship patterns appearing with different people.
Feeling caught between cultures, identities or expectations, and unsure where you fully belong.
You do not need to understand exactly what is happening before you make contact. Part of therapy is creating the space to make sense of it, together.
Where most of my work sits
Addiction and recovery
I work in residential rehabilitation with adults whose substance use is often connected with trauma, anxiety, depression, shame, loss and difficult life experiences. Recovery can ask a great deal of a person, and much of that is not always visible from the outside.
My work is not only about helping you stop a behaviour. It is also about understanding what that behaviour has been doing for you, what need it may have been meeting, what sits underneath it, and what may need to change for recovery to feel more sustainable.
Trauma
Not everyone recognises what they have lived through as trauma. Some experiences become so familiar that they are simply accepted as normal, especially when they begin in childhood.
This can include emotional neglect, instability, criticism, conflict, loss, fear, inconsistency, feeling unsafe, having to grow up too quickly, or learning to put other people’s needs before your own.
Therapy can help you begin to understand how earlier experiences may still be shaping the way you think, feel, relate to others, respond to stress, protect yourself or see yourself now, even if you have never thought of those experiences as traumatic.
Anxiety and depression
Anxiety and depression can show up in very different ways. You might find yourself overthinking, constantly worrying, struggling to switch off, feeling on edge, waking during the night, or feeling as though your mind never really rests.
For others, it can feel more like flatness, disconnection, low motivation, emotional numbness, or simply going through the motions.
I am interested not only in helping you manage the symptoms, but in understanding what may be keeping them going, what they may be connected to, and what might need attention beneath the surface.
Culture, identity and belonging
Sometimes the struggle is not only about how you feel internally. It can also be about where you belong, who you are allowed to be, and the expectations placed on you by family, culture, community or society.
You may feel pulled between different values, roles or identities. You may feel pressure to be one version of yourself in one setting and another somewhere else. You may also know what it is like to be the only person in the room who looks like you, thinks like you, or carries the same cultural experience.
These parts of your life are not background details. They can shape how you understand yourself, your relationships, your choices and your sense of belonging. In therapy, they deserve space too.
How I work
I work integratively, which means therapy is shaped around you rather than asking you to fit into a particular model or way of working.
The foundation of my practice is person centred. Your experience, your pace and what feels most important to you guide the work. Alongside this, I also think psychodynamically, which means I am interested in how earlier experiences may still be influencing the way you relate to yourself and others now.
Sometimes we learn very early how to keep the peace, stay safe, gain approval, avoid conflict, look after other people or become the person everyone can rely on. Those ways of coping can be incredibly useful at one point in life and much less helpful later. Therapy can help make sense of where those patterns came from, why they are still there and whether they still serve you now.
There are also times when understanding is not enough on its own. When emotions become intense very quickly, practical skills can be just as important as insight. I hold DBT Essentials training and I am trained to facilitate DBT skills groups, so where appropriate I can help you develop practical ways to regulate emotions, tolerate distress and respond differently in difficult moments.
Sessions are conversational and collaborative. There is no fixed formula and no expectation that you arrive knowing what to say.
The first step is a free fifteen minute call. There is no obligation to continue and you do not need to explain everything. It is simply an opportunity to get a sense of whether you feel comfortable talking with me.