Dr Charlotte Atkin

Specialising in Psychological therapy

Dr Charlotte Atkin is a Clinical Psychologist registered with the Health & Care Professions Council (HCPC) working online and in person at the Isbourne. She offers evidence-based psychological therapy for a wide range of mental health difficulties, including: anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, problems relating to grief and loss, obsessive-compulsive difficulties, anger problems, personality disorder, bipolar disorder, etc. She may also be able to help with certain physical symptoms, such as medically-unexplained physical difficulties which may cause pain or discomfort. She mainly uses experiential forms of psychotherapy (meaning active participation and engagement with your internal experiences in the session, rather than simply verbal discussion). She is accredited in a form of experiential dynamic therapy (EDT) that emphasises the mind-body link and draws on neuroscience research and attachment theory to examine the unconscious emotional processes that underlie many psychological as well as physical symptoms.

She specialises in helping people who have psychological difficulties resulting from complex trauma, that is, multiple or repeated experiences of trauma. Such experiences may include those where you felt frightened, humiliated, bullied, controlled, threatened, abandoned, rejected, invalidated, unsafe, unsupported, trapped, powerless or ashamed. Complex trauma can occur at any age and is often experienced during childhood, where it may involve explicit physical, emotional or sexual abuse or neglect, or it can result from a complex and confusing mix of experiences where caregivers might be nurturing and protective in some ways, but cause harm in other ways; for example: by being overly critical; by invalidating, ignoring or dismissing a child's feelings; by having very high expectations; or by negatively comparing siblings to one another.

Charlotte has a collaborative, non-pathologising approach to mental health difficulties, seeking to help people understand how their struggles typically make sense in the context of their experiences, rather than being due to an unrelated disease process or biological ‘flaw.’ From a very young age, our minds are skilled at developing different strategies, both conscious and unconscious, to help us survive and feel as safe as possible in this world, even amongst our own families. Often, though, these strategies can become more harmful than helpful, which is where therapy may be beneficial to make sense of this. Charlotte aims to help people uncover who they truly are beneath these survival strategies and reclaim vital parts of themselves, in order to process past painful experiences and remove the blocks to pursuing the lives and relationships they long for.

Typically Charlotte works with individual adults and offers sessions of an hour's duration on a weekly or fortnightly basis, depending on client preference. She offers a free, 20-minute consultation, by phone or over Zoom, to give a potential client the opportunity to talk further about what they would like help with, ask any questions and generally decide if having therapy with her could be helpful. Please contact her by phone (including text or voicemail), email or via her website, animusclinicalpsychology.co.uk.

Charlotte has considerable experience of helping people with complex mental health difficulties, having worked in the NHS in a wide range of settings, from community services to inpatient hospitals, medium secure forensic units and prison. She’s had an interest in how the mind and brain work since she was young. She has a background in neuroscience, having gained her first doctorate exploring mechanisms of brain development.