Sometimes you know exactly why you’re struggling. Something has changed, a relationship is difficult, work has become overwhelming, or an experience from the past keeps finding its way into the present. At other times, it’s harder to explain. You may simply feel off but can’t explain why, or feel lost, exhausted or unlike yourself, wondering why you’re not coping in the way you think you should.
Maisie works with people who may be experiencing anxiety, low mood, stress, burnout, relationship or family difficulties, trauma, motherhood or significant changes in their lives. Often, beneath what is happening on the surface, there are questions about identity: Why do I feel this way? Why do I keep responding like this? What do I actually want? Who am I now?
Her approach is warm, collaborative and unhurried. Rather than telling you what you should do, Maisie offers somewhere you can begin listening to yourself more closely, understanding what has shaped you and developing greater trust in your own feelings and experience.
Change can unsettle our sense of who we are, even when the change is something we expected or chose.
You might be navigating a new stage of life, changes in your relationships, becoming a parent, difficulties at work or simply realising that the way you’ve been living no longer feels right. Perhaps you’re caught in a familiar pattern and can’t understand why you keep returning to it.
Sometimes this can leave you wondering when you lost your sense of yourself or what you actually want from the next stage of your life.
Maisie works with people who feel uncertain, stuck or overwhelmed and want the opportunity to make sense of what’s happening. Therapy can help you explore the experiences that have shaped you, understand patterns that may no longer be helpful and begin considering what you need now.
For some people, this is less about becoming a different person and more about finding their way back to parts of themselves that have become difficult to hear.
Relationships can bring some of our strongest emotions to the surface. You might find yourself having the same arguments with your partner, experiencing anxiety within your relationship, feeling particularly sensitive to rejection or repeatedly ending up in relationships that leave you feeling hurt or misunderstood.
Sometimes the pattern is obvious but difficult to change. At other times, you may only know that something doesn’t feel right.
Individual counselling can give you somewhere to explore what happens within your relationships without reducing the problem to who is right or wrong. Maisie can help you become curious about your emotional responses, your needs and boundaries, and whether earlier experiences may be influencing the relationships you have today.
The aim isn’t to tell you what to do about a relationship, but to help you understand yourself within it more clearly.
Many people reach therapy after spending a long time telling themselves to keep going and cope.
You may be juggling work, family, relationships or parenthood while feeling increasingly anxious, exhausted or overwhelmed. Perhaps you’ve noticed yourself crying more easily, feeling constantly on edge or worrying about the future. You might know something needs to change but have no idea where to begin.
If you’ve been pushing through for a long time, it can also be difficult to recognise when ordinary stress has developed into burnout.
Maisie understands the pressures that can come with freelance and creative careers in particular, including uncertainty, rejection, external validation and burnout. Her own background in the creative industries gives her an understanding of working in environments where professional and personal identity can become closely intertwined.
Therapy provides somewhere to stop performing for a while. You don’t have to demonstrate that you’re coping, explain everything perfectly or arrive with a plan.
Becoming a parent can be transformative, but that doesn’t mean every part of the experience feels enjoyable.
You may love your baby and your family while also feeling overwhelmed, anxious, isolated or disconnected from the person you were before. Changes in identity, relationships, work, your body and your sense of freedom can happen at the same time, and it can be difficult to identify and meet your own needs.
Alongside her counselling work, Maisie volunteers with PANDAS Foundation, supporting mothers experiencing difficulties with their mental health or wellbeing during parenthood. She is also a qualified pre- and postnatal yoga teacher.
Her interest is not in telling you how parenthood should feel, but in giving you somewhere you can be honest about how it actually feels for you.
Emotional distress doesn’t only happen in our thoughts. Anxiety may feel like tightness in your chest or difficulty breathing. Stress might show up as tension, restlessness or exhaustion. Sometimes you notice something physically before you have words for the emotion behind it.
Maisie’s background as a yoga teacher has contributed to her interest in the relationship between emotional and physical experience. Where it feels helpful, she can incorporate mindfulness and ways of managing stress, breathwork and awareness of what you’re noticing in your body into counselling.
This isn’t something you have to do. Maisie works collaboratively, so these are possibilities rather than prescribed techniques. You can decide together what feels useful to you.
There is no need to rush when you arrive.
Maisie wants you to be able to settle into the room, take a breath and decide where you would like to begin. You don’t need to perform, fill every silence or immediately discuss the most difficult thing that has happened to you.
Her style is calm, nurturing and collaborative, with room for warmth and playfulness too. Clients often value feeling heard and cared for and having someone alongside them who isn’t judging or pushing them to disclose more than they are ready to explore.
Maisie believes that you are the expert on your own experience. Her role isn’t to take over or provide a set of instructions for how you should live, but to walk alongside you as you explore your thoughts, feelings and experiences.
Over time, therapy can help you develop greater trust in yourself, noticing what you feel, understanding what you need and becoming more accepting of parts of yourself you may previously have pushed away. This can be particularly important if you have spent a long time feeling that you’re not enough.
Maisie is trained in person-centred and pluralistic counselling. Pluralistic therapy recognises that different people may find different ways of working helpful. Talking may be exactly what you need, but words aren’t the only way we understand ourselves.
If it feels useful, Maisie can offer creative ways of exploring your experience, including sandtray work, imagery, drawing and writing. You don’t need to consider yourself creative or be “good” at any of these things. They simply provide another way of accessing thoughts and emotions that can sometimes be difficult to express through conversation alone.
If you prefer therapy to be more goal-focused or would like to be challenged more directly, that can also become part of the conversation. Maisie regularly considers with clients whether the way you’re working together is meeting your needs rather than assuming that one therapeutic approach will suit everyone.
Maisie’s interest in human nature originally led her towards a career in acting, which developed an already strong curiosity about people, the stories we tell about ourselves and what motivates us to behave as we do. Working in the creative industries also gave her valuable insight into the uncertainty of freelance work, rejection, the search for external validation and the risk of burnout.
Maisie is also a qualified yoga teacher, including specialist pre- and postnatal training. Through teaching, she became increasingly interested in what can happen when we slow down enough to notice our physical and emotional experiences.
Her own experience of person-centred therapy eventually brought these different strands together. Experiencing a therapeutic relationship that allowed her to explore new emotional territory and see herself differently led Maisie to train as a counsellor. Today, her interests in people, creativity, the body and emotional experience all inform the way she works.
Maisie holds a BSc in Person-Centred Pluralistic Counselling (Advanced Practitioner) and is a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).
Her additional training and experience include a 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training qualification, specialist pre- and postnatal yoga teaching, mindfulness and breathwork, and creative therapeutic methods including sandtray, imagery, drawing and writing.
She also holds a BA in Acting from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and volunteers with PANDAS Foundation, supporting mothers experiencing difficulties around parenthood.
You don’t have to know. You might have a particular experience you want to talk about, or you may simply know that you aren’t feeling like yourself.
Maisie will follow your pace. You can begin with whatever feels most present and gradually make sense of what is happening together.
No. You decide what you want to explore and when. Past experiences can sometimes help us understand what is happening in the present, but Maisie won’t push you to talk about something before you feel ready.
Not necessarily. Talking may form most of your therapy, but Maisie’s pluralistic training means she can also offer creative approaches such as writing, drawing, imagery or sandtray work. Mindfulness, breathwork or simply noticing what is happening physically may also be useful.
These are always invitations rather than requirements.
Yes. Maisie offers counselling both in person in Buckhurst Hill and online.
Maisie offers both short- and longer-term counselling depending on what you need. Sessions are 50 minutes long, and you can discuss together what feels most appropriate.
Maisie offers 50-minute counselling sessions in person at Cherry Tree Therapy Centre in Buckhurst Hill and online.
She currently has weekday daytime availability, with some evening and weekend availability, particularly for online sessions.
Sessions are £70. A limited number of concessionary appointments may be available, particularly online.
You don’t need to wait until you completely understand why you’re struggling before coming to counselling. Therapy can be the place where you begin figuring that out.
If you’re interested in working with Maisie, please complete the enquiry form below and she will be in touch to answer any questions or arrange your first counselling session.