Dr Sophia Gazla
Counselling Psychology
My Approach
You might be feeling stuck, overwhelmed, lost, or disconnected from who you truly are. Maybe you've been carrying a lot for a long time, and find yourself in an ongoing battle. Perhaps you're wondering if it’s possible to feel differently and to have a sense of fulfilment and ease with life. If this resonates, you're in the right place.
I bring a deep care and lifelong passion for understanding how our life experiences shape the way we see ourselves, others, and the world around us. Over many years of academic study, personal development, and therapeutic practice, I’ve come to understand just how profoundly our past—especially our painful experiences—can influence our sense of who we are and our engagement with life.
When we've had to adapt in order to survive challenging circumstances, we often develop patterns and strategies that once helped us—yet at some point in time, those same strategies can hold us back. They can make us feel stuck, disconnected from our desires, or uncertain about how to move forward. You might feel like something is in the way of living more freely, more fully, and more in line with your values.
On top of this, we live in a culture that pressures us to “live our best life”—to be successful, happy, and productive—while often ignoring the core human needs for rest, reflection, connection and gentle inner healing. As such, when emotions like anxiety, grief, anger, shame, or despair are neglected, we become split off from these aspects of our experience and our bodies. Attempts to keep such emotions at bay manifest as many different kinds of psychological and physical symptoms, that drain our energy and sense of self, while impacting our relationships, health, and potential to thrive.
Therapy can be a space to pause, to listen inwardly, and to explore the wisdom of the psyche with care, presence, and understanding—and to be supported in the process of real change.
You don’t need to have it all figured out. Whether you’re facing something specific or just feel like something isn’t quite right, I’m here to support you through:
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Life transitions
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Relationship challenges
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Co-dependency or hyper-independence
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Family or workplace dynamics
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Self-doubt, confusion, or shame
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Perfectionism or people-pleasing
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Anxiety, depression, or emotional overwhelm
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Addiction, dissociation, or feeling disconnected
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Complex or developmental trauma
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Fertility issues, grief, and loss
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Intrusive thoughts, OCD, or stuck thought loops
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Intergenerational trauma
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Identity issues
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Emotional, sexual or physical abuse
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PTSD
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C-PTSD
How I Work
I offer a gentle, grounding presence and non-judgmental attention to what you share. Being heard and understood in the nuances of your experiences, in a nurturing space, can be deeply healing.
At the core of the work is the relationship that we will develop, over time. Together, we’ll explore your experiences and how they’re impacting you now—so you can begin to make sense of the patterns that no longer serve you, and reconnect with your inner wisdom. I will support you to deepen your understanding, and your connection to yourself, with a view to gaining clarity over what matters to you most, and to enable your capacity to live as such, with more authentic self-expression and self-care.
I work in a collaborative, relational way—inviting openness, curiosity, and feedback as part of the process. The relationship we build becomes a space to safely explore new ways of being, relating, and showing up more authentically in your life.
How do I work?
At the core of the work is the relationship we will develop. I value offering a nurturing space to help you make sense of and process difficult and uncomfortable experiences, challenging life events and develop insight into aspects of your life that are no longer working for you. I will support you to deepen your connection to yourself and help you consider how to move towards living a life that is meaningful to you. I work in an engaged and collaborative way, encouraging feedback and reflection, and to make use of the relationship we develop for gaining insights and experienting.
Over the years, I have trained in many different models of psychotherapy, including humanistic and existential models, that offers bird's eye view of where you find yourself in the broader context of your life, to bring opportunities for acceptance, and a sense of ownership over the challenges that you face, in order to establish agency and a sense of freedom in your life. A psychodynamic approach brings insight to the influence of your familial relationships on your tendency for relating, both to your internal world, as well as, the repeating patterns in your relationships to others, that no longer serve you well. With a view to exploring new ways to enable your authenticity, boundaries and develop trust, connection and harmony in your relationships. Third-wave models of CBT (Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy) focus on how we attend to our thoughts and feeling, drawing upon mindfulness based skills, that can be grounded within a direction for taking action that is aligned with what is truly important to you.
I am a qualified trauma-informed therapist, this means that I can help you identify where your survival mechanisms, that have served to protect you, can result in unprocessed emotions and exiled parts that perpetuate cycles of stuckness, shame, chronic stress, dissociation, shutdown and fatigue. By gently drawing on somatic awareness and embodiment skills you can learn to regulate and resource your nervous system and body, so that these experiences can be processed, gradually, to enable you to find your centre and capacity for the challenges life can bring whilst inhabiting more fully who you are.
I am currently training as a systemic constellator which further helps deepen awareness into the influence of our family system, and to explore where you may be carrying the residue of intergenerational trauma, and to see where it is possible to release entanglements and energetic blocks. In alignment with this, I find great inspiration from depth-psychology and psycho-spiritual approaches including Shamanism and Mysticism that bring back the lost notion of soul, and it's significance to our reconnection to our sense of self, our intuitive inner guidance system and the world around, us to help navigate along our unique path with health and vitality. I am committed to developing my learning and practice, both personally and professionally and integrate the models above in an intuitive way to best address the issues that you bring.
Let’s Work Together
Get in touch so we can start working together.