LOCATION: Online sessions only
AVAILABILITY: Tuesday afternoon & Wednesday afternoon
PRICE: £70 per session (£40 initial consultation)
SPECIALISMS:
Repeating / Stuck Patterns
Issues from childhood (trauma, disrupted or insecure attachment, ‘inner child’ work)
Daughter/Mother relationships & estrangement
Bereavement
Loss / Separation
Managing difficult feelings (e.g. anxiety, grief)
Trauma (childhood, adult, relational, attachment-based, EMDR trained - EMDR sessions not offered)
Resilience Building
Clinical Supervision (for counsellors & psychotherapists)

Training

Shelley is the Owner of The Palmeira Practice. She trained as a psychodynamic counsellor, and this forms the foundation of her work. She often explores the root causes of an issue, looking at childhood and early experiences and how these might be shaping the present day. She also works holistically, drawing on a rich range of ideas that she weaves into her practice through additional training. This includes working extensively with attachment theory, attachment wounding and the concept of the 'inner child', as well as extensive trauma training and training in neuroscience and somatic work, which is an appreciation of how feelings are so often expressed physically. Shelley is a Senior Accredited Member (SCoPEd framework Column C) of both the BACP and NCPS, with extensive experience working with adults in private practice since 2005, and over 10 years working with young people aged 13 to 25. She now works only with adults.

Approach

Shelley has a particular interest and experience in working with people managing problems that are childhood or attachment-based in origin, those navigating difficult family relationships, past or present, especially daughter-mother dynamics, people experiencing loss or bereavement, and those exploring their sense of purpose or direction in life.

Shelley offers a way of working that draws on her wide range of training and takes a truly holistic approach. By weaving together techniques and skills from various disciplines, she finds the approach that best fits each individual, considering the whole person rather than simply focusing on the presenting issue. We are all unique, and no single therapeutic approach works for everyone.

Repeating / Stuck Patterns

Most of us have had that moment of recognition, the sinking feeling of realising we've been in this place before. Maybe it's the same kind of relationship that slowly unravels in the same way, or a familiar pattern of self-sabotage just as things start going well. These repeating patterns can feel baffling, even maddening, especially when part of us can see exactly what's happening and yet we seem powerless to stop it.

The truth is, these patterns usually make a lot of sense once we begin to understand where they came from. Most have roots in earlier experiences, often from childhood, when we were figuring out how to manage difficult feelings and get our needs met. The strategies we developed back then were often genuinely useful at the time. The problem is we tend to carry them forward long after they've stopped serving us.

Shelley can draw on a psychodynamic approach, which means we pay attention not just to the surface of things but to what might be going on underneath. We might explore what a pattern feels like from the inside, where you first remember something similar, and what feelings or beliefs might be quietly driving it.

Attachment Trauma

Many of us carry wounds we don't fully understand. Perhaps you grew up with a parent who was emotionally unpredictable, warm one moment and cold or critical the next. Perhaps love felt conditional, or expressing needs felt unsafe. Maybe you learned early on that you were somehow too much, or not quite enough. These are all forms of attachment trauma, and they shape us in ways that can be hard to see clearly from the inside.

Attachment trauma doesn't have to mean obvious neglect or abuse. It can be subtle, the family that looked fine from the outside, the childhood that was in many ways happy, and yet something still felt missing or unsafe. What matters is not so much what happened, but what those experiences taught you about yourself and about whether other people can really be trusted.

These early lessons have a way of following us into adult life, showing up in our relationships, in how we respond when someone gets close or pulls away, and in the stories we tell ourselves about our own worth.

Shelley would use attachment theory as a guide when working with you on trauma of this kind, she is interested in understanding the patterns you've developed, not to judge them, but to make sense of them. Those patterns were almost certainly once a form of protection. Therapy offers a space to explore where they came from, and to begin loosening their grip where they're no longer serving you.

Daughter / Mother Relationships

Of all the bonds we carry through life, the one between a mother and daughter is perhaps the most layered, the most tender, and at times the most painful. It shapes how we see ourselves, how we relate to others, and how we understand what it means to be loved.

Whether you are a daughter trying to make sense of a relationship that has always felt complicated, or a mother navigating the grief of estrangement from your child, this is deeply human territory. You are not alone in finding it hard.

In our work together, we would explore not just what has happened between you, but what it has meant to you, and how it lives on in your present life and relationships. The patterns we learned earliest, around closeness and distance, around feeling seen or invisible, around whether it felt safe to need someone, tend to form long before we have words for them. Attachment theory offers a gentle and illuminating frame for this kind of exploration, helping us understand how those earliest bonds shape our capacity for connection throughout life.

There is no agenda to repair a relationship or feel a particular way. Some daughters are working through the loss of a mother who was not fully present. Some mothers are sitting with the quiet heartbreak of a door that has closed. Whatever brings you here, the aim is simply to help you understand yourself more fully, and to find a little more freedom in how you move through the world.

Other Information

Shelley is the Founder and Owner of the Palmeira Practice and has been working as a therapist in Brighton and Hove since 1997, bringing vast experience of working with people of all ages and from all walks of life. She is also Owner and Director of Brighton Therapy Partnership, a training organisation for therapists, through which she stays current with advances in therapeutic practice and thinking. You can read more about Shelley's experience and approach on her website, www.counselling4brighton.co.uk

Shelley's articles in expertise and resources