About Nikki
Nikki (she/her) is dedicated to helping people put their traumas and adverse life experiences in the past to increase their quality of life in the present. Lugging the past around is hard work! And although managing trauma feels familiar and therapy can seem intimidating, the hard work in therapy typically results in everything else becoming easier. The past can infiltrate our daily life in various ways, such as repeating patterns that don’t serve us, having big reactions that are distressing and damage relationships, or just feeling anxious all the time. Some people who are stuck in these patterns attend years of talk therapy and just don’t seem to get the results and lasting change they are after. If this sounds like you, Nikki would love to work with you!
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Nikki spent over a decade working across Community Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drugs, and Disability, before obtaining her registration as a psychologist. These experiences took Nikki into the homes of people who struggled with their mental health and various physical abilities, and had her work alongside The Department of Justice with people in the forensic system, and alongside Child Protective Services. These were non-clinical experiences that became the foundations of how Nikki approaches psychology long before her psychologist registration. Nikki believes strongly in an empowering, person-centered approach, and working collaboratively with people without judgement. She strives for people to feel genuinely seen for their strengths and challenges and to develop a treatment plan which encompasses both.
Nikki is best suited to someone who has a willingness to work through some of the hard stuff from their past to make their present and future a more comfortable place to live. Therapy with Nikki won’t spend too much time focusing on strategies to just cope with past pain, but rather will aim get you coping enough to complete the deeper work to achieve lasting change.
Nikki has a casual yet direct therapeutic style which is always combined with a strong sense of empathy and compassion. She is passionate about treating people from all aspects of life, especially those who have complex needs such as various forms of trauma-based presentations, substance misuse, and people who have a forensic background.
Nikki’s goal is to provide treatment so that therapy may eventually no longer be necessary.
In this endeavour, Nikki will work with people to try and develop an understanding of how they have gotten to where they are, and develop a plan to treat the origins of their mental health challenges so they can begin to live a happier and more fulfilling life.
Nikki takes a respectful and non-judgemental approach of all people regardless of history, ethnicity or culture, subculture, LGBTIQA+, neurodiversity, internal system structure, and the intersectionality of any/all of the above.
She works with people 18 years and over, with her primary framework being Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and using a parts-based framework. She compliments EMDR with a variety of evidence-based approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Motivational Interviewing (MI), Schema Therapy, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).