Work with a specialist therapist from your own private space — without geography deciding who you can see. Online counselling, hypnotherapy and ERP-informed work can bring therapy into the situations where the difficulty actually happens, while fitting more easily around everyday life.
Online sessions can save travel time and make specialist therapy easier to access. But for some people, their greatest advantage is more therapeutic than practical: we are working while you are already in the environment where many of your everyday patterns, triggers and choices occur.
If you are looking for someone who understands OCD, intrusive thoughts, anxiety or persistent uncertainty, you are not limited to therapists within travelling distance. Online work lets you choose the therapist and approach that feel most relevant to you.
When a difficulty is tied to your home, routines, objects, checking or avoidance, we can sometimes work with what is actually around you rather than trying to recreate the situation in a consulting room.
There is no journey before or after the session. That can make therapy easier to protect around work, caring responsibilities, mobility needs or a busy week — while still giving the hour a clear boundary and purpose.
One of the common worries about online therapy is whether the relationship will feel as genuine when we are not sitting in the same room.
Research comparing videoconferencing psychotherapy with in-person work has found no significant difference in therapeutic alliance overall. In practice, once the first few minutes of a session are underway, the technology often recedes into the background and the focus becomes the conversation between us.
Evidence note: a 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis found no statistically significant difference in therapeutic alliance ratings between videoconferencing and in-person psychotherapy. View the research ↗
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is not about making you anxious for the sake of it. It is about creating useful experiences in which you approach what matters while reducing the checking, reassurance, avoidance or other compulsive responses that keep the old pattern going.
Sometimes that learning is easier to make relevant when we can work with the situations you actually meet at home. A consulting room cannot always reproduce the tap you repeatedly check, the household task you avoid, the object that triggers contamination fears or the routine that becomes caught up in “just right” rules.
Where appropriate, practice can involve the objects, rooms, routines or decisions that are already part of your day, rather than an approximation created in therapy.
Being in your own setting can help us identify subtle safety behaviours, mental rituals, reassurance habits or avoidance that may be less visible in a consulting room.
Practice in everyday contexts may help new learning generalise beyond the therapy hour. We review what happened and adapt the next experiment rather than treating ERP as a rigid hierarchy.
I offer both online sessions across the UK and face-to-face therapy in Plymouth. Online is not automatically better or worse than meeting in person. We can think about what you need, what feels workable and whether the setting gives us the right conditions for therapy.
LIBERATE is the flexible, evidence-informed framework that guides my work with OCD, intrusive thoughts and anxiety. It brings together counselling, hypnosis, experiential learning and behavioural change.
We will develop a shared understanding of the pattern that is keeping you stuck, then use carefully chosen experiences to help you respond differently when thoughts, feelings or bodily sensations feel difficult to ignore. Online work can make that learning especially immediate because you can practise in the context of ordinary life rather than keeping therapy separate from it.
You do not need a special setup or a perfectly calm room. You need enough privacy to speak freely, a stable internet connection and a device that can run Zoom comfortably.
I will send you the joining information by email. Choose a private place, charge your device and allow a few minutes before your first appointment to check Zoom, your camera and your sound.
We talk in much the same way we would face to face. Depending on what you need, the session may include counselling, psychoeducation, behavioural or attention work, ERP, hypnosis or other agreed therapeutic methods.
Because you are already at home, you can move directly back into your day. Where useful, we may agree one small experiment or piece of practice that helps the session connect with what happens between appointments.
A 2024 meta-analysis of 18 publications found no statistically significant difference in therapeutic alliance between videoconferencing psychotherapy and in-person psychotherapy, whether rated by clients or therapists. PubMed ↗
NICE guidance for OCD recognises CBT including ERP delivered remotely in some circumstances and specifically notes that home-based treatment may be appropriate where symptoms or functioning make this useful. NICE guidance ↗
A 2024 study of therapist-guided videoconference ERP carried out at home found the approach promising as an addition to inpatient treatment and highlighted its potential to help learning generalise into everyday settings. It was a non-randomised study, so it should be treated as encouraging rather than definitive evidence. PubMed ↗
I use Zoom for online counselling and hypnotherapy. I will send the joining details before your appointment. You can use a computer, tablet or phone, although a larger screen is often more comfortable for a full therapy session.
Choose somewhere reasonably quiet and private where you can speak without being overheard. Headphones can add privacy if you find them comfortable. Put your phone and computer notifications on silent, and switch off voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant in the room.
Yes. Counselling and hypnotherapy can each be used online, either separately or as part of the same piece of work where that is appropriate. Hypnosis does not require me to be physically beside you; you remain aware and in control, and we agree the purpose of the work together. You can read more about the two ways of working on my Counselling & Hypnotherapy page.
It can be. For some OCD presentations, online sessions offer a useful advantage because we can plan or carry out ERP in the environment where the relevant triggers and compulsions occur. That does not make online ERP automatically better than in-person work. We will consider your particular pattern, goals, privacy and circumstances and choose practice that is collaborative and proportionate.
If OCD and intrusive thoughts are central to what brings you, you may also find my specialist OCD therapy page helpful.
No. I am based in Plymouth, Devon, but I offer online therapy across the UK. This means you can work with me without travelling to Plymouth and can choose based on specialist fit rather than distance.
My online therapy service is primarily for people based in the UK. If you are normally UK-based but will be abroad for a session, or if you live outside the UK and are considering working with me, please contact me first. Professional, insurance and jurisdiction requirements can vary between countries, so suitability needs to be checked rather than assumed.
Occasional glitches happen. We can usually reconnect quickly. At the start of our work we will make sure I have the contact details I need so that, if the connection fails for longer, we have a simple way to decide what happens next.
I’m not currently accepting new therapy clients. Join my priority list and I’ll contact you when I can offer a suitable new-client appointment. Joining the list does not commit you to booking.