Central London abuse recovery counselling
Helping you survive and thrive after abuse
Whatever type of abuse you’ve experienced, help is available. Friendly, understanding, expert counselling in Kings Cross, Oxford Circus and online.
What constitutes abuse?
Abuse is deliberate behaviour to harm, control, intimidate or exploit another person. It can happen between any two people and in any setting. It always affects the victim negatively. Sometimes abuse is obvious. Often, it is subtle, hidden or confusing, so the victim may not realise that what is happening constitutes abuse.
What are the different types of abuse?
Guidance for implementing The Care Act (2014) identifies ten types of abuse:
physical abuse
domestic violence (including non-physical domestic abuse)
sexual abuse
psychological abuse
financial or material abuse
modern slavery
discriminatory abuse
organisational abuse
neglect and acts of omission
self-neglect.
All of these can cause long-lasting, profound damage. Below I have gone into more detail about the types of abuse most commonly seen in abuse counselling, but counselling is beneficial if you have experienced any of the above.
What is physical abuse?
Physical abuse includes hitting, slapping, punching, burning, restraining without consent, force-feeding and physical punishments.
We can’t know exactly how common physical abuse is, as it often goes unreported, but research by Radford et al (2011) for the NSPCC found that 11.5% of young adults experienced severe physical abuse as children. This percentage may well be higher among older adults, as attitudes to physical abuse have changed over the years. Of course, physical abuse doesn’t just happen in childhood. Physical abuse of adults includes domestic abuse, assaults such as muggings and abuse of elderly or vulnerable adults by their carers.
What is domestic violence?
Domestic violence doesn’t just include physical violence. It also encompasses psychological, emotional, sexual or financial abuse. It is most commonly perpetrated by intimate partners or ex-partners, but can be by any family member. It affects people of all genders and sexualities.
The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that 3.8 million people over 16 experienced domestic abuse in the year to March 2025. That’s 7.8% of the population.
I have undertaken specialist training to work with couples who want to improve a relationship that has previously involved domestic abuse. You can find out more about this in Working with domestic abuse.
What is sexual abuse?
Sexual abuse includes rape and attempted rape, sexual assault, inappropriate touch, looking or innuendo, indecent exposure, forced use of pornography, sexual photography and non-consensual acts.
The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that 900,000 people over 16 experienced sexual assault in the year to March 2025. That’s 1.9% of the population. The same survey found that most sexual assaults are not reported to the police and that, of those that are, 82% of victims are female.
The previous year’s survey collected data on child abuse and estimated that 4.3 million people in England and Wales experienced childhood sexual abuse. That’s 9.1% of the population.
What is psychological abuse?
Psychological abuse (also known as emotional abuse) includes intimidation, threatening violence, coercion, harassment, humiliation, preventing someone from accessing services such as education or medical treatment, isolating someone from their family or friends, taking away a person’s means of communication or transport and cyber-bullying.
Statistics on psychological abuse tend to focus on childhood abuse, although adults experience it too, for example as a form of domestic abuse. In their research for the NSPCC, Radford et al (2011) found that 6.9% of young adults had experienced emotional abuse during childhood. Psychological or emotional abuse can be really difficult to define, and often people don’t realise that what they went through in childhood was abusive until they reflect on it later in life.
What is neglect?
Neglect occurs when a caregiver does not fulfil their duty to care for another person. This might be a parent failing to look after their child, or an adult not caring satisfactorily for a disabled relative, for instance. Examples of neglect include not providing food or clothing, failing to keep the person safe and not looking after the person’s hygiene or medical needs.
Radford et al (2011) found neglect to be the most prevalent form of abuse experienced in childhood, with 16% of young adults reporting neglect at some point in their childhood.
How does abuse affect you?
Abuse has a huge impact on people. It can affect them in lots of different ways, and often clients come to therapy not realising how much their ways of thinking, mental health and behaviours have been altered by going through the experience of abuse.
For example, survivors of abuse may experience:
sleeplessness, nightmares or bedwetting
anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts
difficulty feeling safe in relationships
problems in parenting their own children
self-destructive behaviours like addiction or self-harm
difficulty staying in education or work
unpredictable, inconsistent and extreme emotions.
Can you recover from abuse?
Yes, definitely. It takes time, but I’ve seen many clients emerge from the shadow of abuse and go on to live happier lives. Of course, the memories don’t go away completely, but they don’t have such a hold over the person. It’s like the person becomes able to see the abuse as a terrible thing that happened to them, rather than it being part of who they are.
Can therapy fix abuse?
What I wouldn’t give to be able to fix abuse and make it disappear from a person’s history! An important part of abuse recovery counselling is grieving for the innocence that has been lost - you will never again not be a survivor of abuse, and that is heart-breaking.
What therapy can do, though, is help you to make sense of it, understand how it has impacted you and reverse some of those impacts.
How can counselling help survivors of abuse?
Many people who have experienced abuse hold themselves responsible, at least in part. Sadly, this is particularly true for those who experienced abuse as children. It’s the way a child’s mind works - it’s feels more manageable for a child to think “I’m being hurt because I did something wrong, so I’ll try harder to be good in future,” than to think “I’m being hurt because my caregiver is dangerous and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Counselling helps people to see that they were not responsible for their abuse, only their abuser was. That can really help a person’s self-worth.
Survivors of abuse often find it difficult to trust others or to form loving relationships. This isn’t surprising given that their trust has previously been betrayed and they may not have experienced many healthy, loving relationships. So an abuse recovery counsellor helps them to see this lens through which they are viewing the world and to notice and change the behaviours that prevent them from forming healthy relationships. With time, the person is able to trust that other people won’t treat them as their abuser did.
Each survivor has their own ways in which the abuse has affected them, and abuse recovery therapy provides the help they need - from reducing self-harm to supporting with parenting strategies, from overcoming anxiety to forming healthier relationships.
What is the best therapy for abuse?
Talking about abuse needs to be done gently and slowly. Six sessions of CBT is not going to cut it! You need to have the space to open up to your therapist in your own time, with no pressure to talk about anything before you’re ready. I suggest open-ended counselling or psychotherapy (in other words, you’re not limited to a set number of sessions), so that you can take things at your own pace rather than feeling pressured to fit things in before the sessions run out. Of the three main schools of therapy, I recommend humanistic or psychodynamic for working with abuse or, better still, choose an integrative therapist like me who combines both.
If your abuse has affected your sex life, you may want to see a therapist who is also qualified in psychosexual therapy.
What happens in abuse recover counselling?
When you come for an initial consultation, I will ask you to give me an overview of your background and what you’d like to work on in therapy. Most people bring more than one issue to therapy, so it’s absolutely fine to bring other issues as well as the abuse. The abuse might not even be the main thing you want to address, and you might not be ready to talk about it straight away. That’s all fine.
If you find it hard to talk, we’ll take it gently and I’ll ask questions to help you.
At the end of the initial consultation, I’ll ask if you want to continue counselling with me. If you do, we’ll arrange a regular weekly appointment time. If you want to continue but I don’t feel like the right person for you, I know lots of great counsellors I can recommend. I can send them the notes from the initial consultation so you don’t have to start over from scratch with them.
If you continue with me, in each session we’ll just talk. What we talk about is completely up to you. It can be something that’s happened to you that week, something from your past or hopes for your future. It might be several different things in each session, or just one. You might come back to the same topic every time or you might shift between topics. It all works.
Sometimes, when clients tell me about their abuse, it’s the first time they’ve told anyone. Just saying it out loud can feel huge. They might just hint at it at first then gradually, as they learn how safe therapy is, more comes out. There’s never any pressure from me to talk about it (or anything else in therapy) before you’re ready. And I make sure we talk about it in a way that that feels manageable to you.
I will take your abuse seriously. It’s very common for people to underestimate the abuse they received (“It’s not like it happened every day,” etc). In doing so, they subconsciously diminish their self-worth. In those cases, an important part of abuse recovery counselling is for me to help them to gradually shift their perspective to “This was big, it was not okay and I did not deserve this.”
Often, people have conflicting feelings about their abuse and their abuser. They might be a relative or ex-partner who could also be very loving. Alongside the abuse there might have been acts of warmth and care. There may have been parts of the relationship that the survivor really cherished. It’s rarely as simple as “They were bad.” So there will likely be confusing and messy feelings that together we can make sense of.
Above all, abuse recovery counselling is gentle and you are in control. Part of what is therapeutic about it is how different it is from your abuse: your will is respected, you take the lead, you have all the time and space you need to think and there is no pressure to do anything you don’t want to do.
Where do you offer abuse recovery counselling?
I provide abuse recovery counselling at two lovely therapy rooms in Central London:
My Kings Cross room is two minutes’ walk from the station and also within easy walking distance of St Pancras, Euston and Russell Square. It is convenient for Clerkenwell, Bloomsbury, Pentonville, Islington, Barnsbury, Camden and Angel.
My Oxford Circus room is in a quiet street five minutes’ walk from Oxford Circus itself and also within easy walking distance of Goodge Street, Warren Street and Holborn. It is convenient for Fitzrovia, Soho, Regent Street, Mayfair, Bloomsbury, Harley Street and Marylebone.
I am also happy to offer abuse recovery counselling online.
Why choose me?
I offer integrative psychotherapy and counselling, incorporating humanistic and psychodynamic approaches. I work in an open-ended way, so you can take things at your pace. I also offer psychosexual therapy so I can help with any sexual issues you may be having, whether or not they are connected to your abuse. I’m also trained to work safely with ongoing relationships where there has been domestic abuse.
I’ve been successfully helping individuals and couples to recover from abuse for over 15 years. Clients feel comfortable with me because I’m supportive, warm and friendly.
My therapy practices are conveniently located near Kings Cross and Oxford Circus, and I also offer online therapy. I offer free introductory chats and half price initial consultations so that you don’t have to spend a lot to get a feel for whether I’m a good fit for you.
Most clients who come for an initial consultation with me choose to continue with me, but if I’m not the right fit for you, I will be happy to refer you to a colleague. I manage a large team of therapists so if I’m not right for you there’s a good chance I know someone who is.
Next steps
If that sounds good to you, it’s easy to book an initial consultation or a free introductory phone call here…
If you want to find out more first, feel free to contact me and I’ll get back to you promptly.