A space to understand yourself more deeply
Psychotherapy for adults and young people in London, Sevenoaks and online
There are times when the way we have always managed no longer seems to work.
You may know what has brought you to therapy. A relationship has ended. Anxiety is taking over. You have lost someone or something important. Life has changed and you are struggling to find your footing.
At other times, it is harder to put into words. Life may look fine from the outside, yet something does not feel right. You may feel stuck, disconnected from yourself, or caught in the same patterns again and again.
Therapy gives you time to pause and look more closely at what is going on. Together, we can begin to make sense of your experience and understand what may need to change.
You may recognise something here
Perhaps you have become used to holding everything together while quietly struggling yourself.
You may find yourself returning to the same kind of relationship, even though you want something different.
You may spend so much time thinking about what other people need or expect that you have lost touch with what you want.
Perhaps you are hard on yourself, question your choices or never quite feel good enough.
Or there may be no clear crisis at all.
Only a growing sense that something in your life needs your attention.
You do not need to know exactly what is wrong before coming to therapy. Finding the words can be part of the work.
Understanding before change
We often want difficult feelings to go away.
Yet anxiety, sadness, anger, loneliness and emptiness can tell us something important about our lives.
Anxiety may show us where we feel unsure or under threat. Anger may tell us that something important has been crossed. Grief speaks of what we have loved and lost. A sense of emptiness may appear when the life we are living no longer feels like our own.
The same is true of the ways we cope.
Being strong, pleasing others, staying in control or keeping people at a distance may once have helped us. Over time, these same ways of coping can begin to hold us back.
Therapy gives us a chance to understand these patterns rather than judge them.
When we begin to see why we feel and act as we do, we have more choice about what happens next.
What I can help with
Anxiety and worry
You may worry about what could go wrong, think through the same problems again and again, or find it hard to switch off. We can look at what drives the anxiety as well as how it affects your daily life.Relationships
You may keep finding yourself in the same patterns with partners, family or friends. Therapy can help you understand what happens in your relationships and why some ways of relating feel so hard to change.Loss and change
Loss can take many forms. It may be the death of someone you love, the end of a relationship, a change in work, children leaving home, or the loss of a future you had pictured for yourself.
Self-worth, identity and feeling stuck
You may be hard on yourself, unsure of what you want or too used to looking to others for answers. Perhaps life looks good on paper but does not feel right from the inside.
How I work
I am an integrative psychotherapist. This means I do not use one set method with every person.
I see therapy as a meeting between two people. I bring my training, experience and full attention. You bring the knowledge of what it is like to live your life. We may explore what is happening in your life now, past events that still affect you, or patterns that keep returning.
My work is shaped by person-centred, humanistic, psychodynamic and Jungian ideas. I also have advanced training in dream work. If dreams matter to you, we can explore them as part of therapy.
I will not tell you how to live your life. My role is to help you understand yourself well enough to find your own way.
About me
I am Merike Taal, an integrative psychotherapist working with adults and young people.
I have worked with clients since 2018, both in private practice and in the charity sector. My work has brought me alongside people facing anxiety, depression, loss, trauma, relationship problems, low self-worth, questions of identity and suicidal thoughts.
I trained for five years at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education in London and later completed advanced training in dream work at the Dream Research Institute.
I am a registered member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).
Locations
Wednesday - FridayLondon
Paddington
Saturday
St. Julians ClubSevenoaks
Every therapy relationship begins with a conversation
You do not need to know exactly what you want to say before you contact me.
Our first meeting gives us time to talk about what has brought you to therapy, what you hope might change and whether working together feels right.
You can also ask me questions about therapy and the way I work.
There is no need to decide anything before we meet.
