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Skills Based Therapies
ACT & DBT-informed
Real tools for real life.
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT)-informed skills work
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a mindfulness-based approach that changes your relationship with your thoughts and feelings. Rather than fighting what's inside, you learn to make room for it and still move toward the life that matters to you.
DBT-informed skills work draws on practical tools from Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, building your capacity to navigate intense emotions, tolerate difficult moments and connect more meaningfully with others.
Together they offer something that deeper processing work like EMDR, Brainspotting and IFS doesn't always address on its own. The day-to-day skills to actually live differently. If that sounds like what you've been missing, read on.
Life is hard enough without wrestling with your own mind every day.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is one of the most well-researched therapeutic approaches available. At its core, it offers a fundamentally different relationship with your inner world. Most of us spend enormous energy trying to push away difficult thoughts and feelings, arguing with them, suppressing them or waiting for them to disappear before we can start living. ACT works in the opposite direction. Rather than fighting what's inside, you learn to observe it with curiosity, make room for it, and still move toward the things that genuinely matter to you. Values, meaning, a life that feels like yours.
It sits naturally alongside approaches like EMDR and IFS because it works at a different layer. Where EMDR and Brainspotting help the nervous system process and release what it has been holding, and IFS helps you understand the parts of you that developed to survive, ACT gives you something to orient toward. A compass, not just a wound to heal. It answers the question that often follows deep trauma work: now that I've processed this, how do I actually live?
Alongside ACT, I draw on DBT-informed skills, practical tools developed within Dialectical Behaviour Therapy that help you navigate intense emotions, tolerate distress without making things worse, and build relationships that feel more secure and connected. These aren't delivered as a formal DBT program. They are woven into our work together in a way that is responsive and tailored to you.
The skills we may draw on include mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness. Simple in concept, genuinely life-changing in practice when they become part of how you move through the world.
Together, ACT and DBT-informed skills work offer what insight alone rarely provides. Not just understanding why you feel the way you do, but real, practical ways of responding differently. Of choosing, even in hard moments, the life you actually want to be living.
If EMDR, Brainspotting or IFS is the deeper excavation, ACT and DBT-informed skills are how you learn to build on the ground that work uncovers.
What a session looks like when we're working with ACT
ACT sessions don't follow a rigid structure. They are conversational, exploratory and grounded in what is alive for you in that moment. We might begin by noticing what has come up during the week, where you felt pulled away from the things that matter to you, where you got hooked by a thought or overwhelmed by a feeling.
From there we work with that material directly. That might mean exploring what your values actually are beneath the noise, because many people have never been asked that question seriously. It might mean practising defusion, learning to observe a thought rather than be swallowed by it. Or it might mean sitting with a difficult emotion together and discovering that you can tolerate it without needing it to disappear first.
You will often leave a session with something small and practical to take into your week. Not homework in the traditional sense, but an experiment. A way of testing what it feels like to show up differently in your own life.
What a session looks like when we're drawing on DBT-informed skills
DBT skills work is more structured by nature, but in the way I use it, it is always in service of what you need right now rather than delivered as a curriculum.
We might spend time in a session learning a specific skill together, understanding what it is, why it works, and practising it in real time. Mindfulness as a way of coming back to the present moment. Distress tolerance tools for the moments when everything feels too much and you need to get through without making things worse. Emotion regulation strategies that help you understand what you are feeling and why, so it stops running the show. Interpersonal skills for the relationships where you keep hitting the same wall.
The difference between knowing a skill and having it available in a hard moment is practice. So we practise together, and I support you in finding ways to make it real between sessions too.
In this playful animation, Dr Russ Harris, author of the international best-seller The Happiness Trap, illustrates a simple but powerful tool from ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), called ‘The Choice Point’ . This tool provides a way to quickly identify the source of your biggest problems (and recognise what you are doing that’s making them worse) and plan how to deal with them effectively. It’s a guide to reducing your suffering; a map to take your life in a meaningful direction.
Your next chapter starts here
You don’t have to keep carrying this alone. If you’re ready to go deeper, heal what’s been holding you back and finally feel like yourself again - I’d be honoured to be part of your journey.