Dr Hannah Murray

 

Individual therapy can be a daunting but highly rewarding venture. When made sense of in a supportive, therapeutic environment, mental and emotional distress offers an opportunity for significant personal growth. With this in mind, my highest priority is to offer a warm, trusting, non-judgmental space where honest dialogue can happen and you can feel safe being a messy, ambivalent and contradictory human being (because we all are!). 

I have worked in NHS services for 15 years and have acquired a broad range of therapeutic skills and experience working with a variety of diagnoses and clinical presentations. It was important to me to gain an understanding of the many different ways emotional distress can be expressed and the challenges and dilemmas people face at different ages, stages and transition points in their lives. I am particularly passionate about working with people who want to think deeply about themselves, in order to understand themselves and their relationships better and make meaningful, fundamental changes. I'm trained in several therapeutic models and the methods and techniques I use will largely depend on your hopes for meeting with me. Perhaps most frequently, I utilise psychoanalytic ideas when offering longer-term therapy, and Cognitive Analytical Therapy, Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy and Compassion Focused Therapy, when offering something shorter-term. Either way the aim is to support people to develop insight; self-understanding; more rewarding ways of relating and greater authenticity. This can be liberating and help open the door to greater possibilities in people’s lives.

Adult mental health, perinatal/parent mental health and gender dysphoria are my areas of specialism. I have extensive experience  working with difficulties such as depression, loneliness, emptiness, stress, low self-esteem, perfectionism, the spectrum of anxiety conditions (including generalised anxiety disorder, panic, OCD), long-term health conditions (including chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pain and HIV), childhood trauma and adults who have difficulties making or keeping satisfying relationships, or who find themselves repeatedly drawn into unhappy partnerships. I support people to experience symptom relief but also to understand themselves more deeply and to live with greater honesty, flexibility and freedom. That usually means exploring patterns that began long ago but still shape the present: in relationships, in work, and in the ways that we cope, connect, or come undone. In my experience, even the most baffling and bizarre of symptoms can be made sense of as clever adaptations and coping strategies in light of a person’s history.

 

In regards to working with perinatal distress, I have worked for several years in NHS Perinatal Mental Health Services supporting parents during pregnancy and the first two years of their child's life. I have also worked as a Senior Psychologist in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs), with families and medical teams caring for unwell or premature babies. I support parents who have had difficulties with conception (e.g. IVF), anxiety in pregnancy, birth trauma, NICU trauma, perinatal loss, postnatal depression, OCD and difficulties in parents' own childhoods that have been stirred up by the transition to parenthood. 

 

I view the transition to parenthood as a major life event and recent statistics indicate that up to 50% of parents can be suffering from some form of postnatal depression in the first year after giving birth. The two main factors that contribute to parents experiencing significant emotional difficulty when having a baby are 1) a lack of adequate supportive structures in their present life and 2) unresolved issues around the parenting that they received as a child, which are almost certain to resurface when they are required to offer intensive parenting themselves. In a world that idealises and/or denigrates parenthood, many mothers and fathers are afraid of being seen as incompetent or unwell if they do not profess to being happy all the time. Through my experience, I understand that parenting can be an incredibly difficult and demanding job; that people’s experience of care-giving is influenced by a whole array of factors (e.g. the conception, birth, bereavements, parents’ own histories, isolation) and that as a result, having a baby can understandably evoke a myriad of emotions. Having a reflective and supportive space in therapy, where you can identify, name and make sense of the difficulties and ambivalences, can enable you to feel more empowered to work through it.

 

I have also worked at the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service supporting children and young people with gender dysphoria and their families; in NHS sexual health settings and with adults with gender dysphoria in private practice. This has granted me the privilege of working with members or the LGBTQ community and with individuals who were struggling with personal and intimate issues relating to identity, sexuality, sexual dysfunction and risky sexual behaviour. I am very interested in the different ways our life experiences can affect our relationship to and experience of our body.

 

I have degrees from the University of Manchester and Royal Holloway, University of London. I am registered as a Clinical Psychologist with the HCPC.  I have begun further training in psychoanalysis, so I am also very open to seeing people who want to do twice weekly, open ended work. Lastly, I have a keen interest in teaching, research and providing supervision and consultation to other health professionals.