Mentalese

I called this practice Mentalese. Say it slowly. Mental ease. That's what I hope you leave the room having found a little more of.

Who I sit with

I work with adolescents, adults and older adults, in person at my practice in Carlow and online via secure video across Ireland.

The people I sit with often come because:

• Something feels stuck. A pattern of thought, a relationship, a way of being they can't quite name.

• Anxiety has narrowed their life. At work, in social situations, or inside their own body.

• They are living with, or recovering from, addiction.

• They are carrying loss. Of a person, a chapter of life, or a version of themselves they thought they'd be.

• A childhood that wasn't safe is still asking to be tended to.

How I work

I work integratively. I came to clinical work through addiction first, and that's where I learned how much of human behaviour is run by parts of ourselves we don't fully understand. The long-rehearsed patterns. The relationship with ourselves that quietly shapes every relationship with anyone else.

Addiction work led me into anxiety in its many forms, social, health, generalised, and into loss and grief, because the things we are most attached to are often the things we can't bear to lose. It led me back, again and again, to the relationships in which we make and unmake ourselves.

So when you sit with me, I'm interested in two layers at once. There is the layer of thought: what you're telling yourself, the rules you're living by, the catastrophic predictions or harsh self-judgments. That's where Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and structured tools have their place. Underneath that is the felt layer: the body's wisdom, the things that haven't yet found language. That's where I work with felt experience and somatic awareness. The pace is yours. We review together as we go.

What brought me to counselling

I came to this work the long way round. My undergraduate degree was an unusual combination of Psychology and Economics, and one module has stayed with me ever since: household economics. We were studying the everyday calculations young families make. When to return to work after a baby. How to keep up mortgage payments. What to do about the cost of childcare. The ways the labour market and the price of health insurance shape decisions about work and care, and the way the burden of those decisions falls hardest, often, on women.

What I saw there was that emotional life and economic life are not separate things. People sit inside systems. House prices, working hours, the costs of caring for someone. Those systems become private weather inside us. Anxiety. Exhaustion. The quiet grief of not having time for what matters. That early lens of people inside systems has shaped how I sit with clients ever since.

Before I trained as a therapist, I lived in France for a decade, working in the fashion industry. It was a world I loved, and one that taught me something direct about what it feels like to be the outsider in a demanding environment. What it feels like to fit in somewhere unfamiliar, to perform in a culture where being acceptable feels essential, to feel the cost of getting it wrong. I think of that experience often when I'm sitting with clients working through questions of identity, belonging, and the loneliness of pretending to be okay.

The word has another meaning too. In philosophy, Mentalese is the name for the inner language of thought, the wordless conversation we hold with ourselves before any of it is spoken. Most of my work happens in that space, listening to what people are saying to themselves underneath what they're saying to me, and helping them make a different conversation possible.

To find out more about my experience and qualifications, click on my professional profile below.