About Alison
I am a Clinical Psychologist with more than eighteen years of experience helping adults navigate anxiety, self-doubt, chronic stress, relationship difficulties and life transitions. I work online and in person from my practice in Cape Town.
What interests me most is what happens to us under stress. Anxiety and chronic stress don't only make life harder. They can change how we think, feel, relate and respond. Under prolonged load, even people who function well can lose access to what I think of as adaptive flexibility: the clarity, flexibility, confidence, creativity and self-trust they rely on most.
My formal training is in psychodynamic psychotherapy with individuals. This is what grounds my practice. It means we pay attention to your history, your relationships, and the patterns you have carried, on the understanding that most of what troubles us once made sense.
I have also completed Level 1 training in EMDR. Where distressing or unresolved experiences are part of the picture, EMDR offers a more targeted way to work with them, and I draw on it within that broader frame.
My thinking is also shaped by Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), compassion-focused work and research on emotion regulation. These approaches inform how I work without replacing the psychodynamic foundation. ACT, in particular, has deepened my interest in psychological flexibility: our ability to stay present, make choices and move toward what matters, even when difficult thoughts and feelings are present.
Ultimately, I am interested in helping people develop a different relationship with stress, anxiety and self-doubt, and greater trust in their ability to meet what life brings. Confidence, in this sense, is not the absence of doubt or difficulty. It is knowing that you can stay present, make choices and respond when things don't go according to plan
Background
I have been interested in the impact of stress on the mind, the body and behaviour since my undergraduate years. My first degree was a double major in physiology and psychology, including neuroanatomy and a good deal of work on the stress response, and I went on to study psychoneuroimmunology and health psychology at Honours level, examining how stress affects immune function.
That grounding has stayed with me. It is part of why I think about anxiety and chronic stress as things happening in a body under load, and not only as ways of thinking.
I trained as a Clinical Psychologist at the University of Cape Town, following earlier research experience at the Human Sciences Research Council while completing my Master's degree at Stellenbosch University.
I later completed a PhD examining children's relationships, resilience and development in contexts of adversity in South Africa. The research was qualitative and situated within public mental health rather than clinical practice. It looked at how children experience violence and hardship as an ordinary feature of daily life, and at what support can and cannot do under those conditions.
What carried over into my clinical work was less the findings than the way of thinking. Resilience turned out to be far less a personal quality than a property of the environment around a person: what was available, who was present, what was actually possible to do. Agency, too, looked different once you took the circumstances seriously.
That has stayed with me. When someone describes their childhood, I am listening for the conditions they were adapting to, rather than for what they ought to have managed better. It is also why I hold on to the belief that people have more capacity for change than they credit themselves with.
Registration and training
Clinical Psychologist, registered with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA)
HPCSA registration number: PS 0103225
Practice number: 0335231
BSc Physiology and Psychology, University of Cape Town
BA Honours in Psychology, University of Cape Town
MA Psychology, Stellenbosch University
MA Clinical Psychology, University of Cape Town
PhD, Stellenbosch University
EMDR Level 1
