Clinical Psychologist Dubai
With 20 years of experience as a clinical psychologist, I relocated to the United Arab Emirates in 2019. I work with adults presenting with depression, anxiety, fear, anger, grief, trauma, guilt, betrayal, and self-criticism. My approach is psychodynamic: it attends to what lies underneath the presenting difficulty rather than only to its surface. Practising in Dubai, a multi-cultural city, affirms that similar psychological difficulties occur across all nationalities and backgrounds.
What Do You See?
The image at the top of the page can be viewed as a rabbit or a duck. Both are present, but most people see only one at first. What we perceive is shaped by what we expect to see, and the factors underlying our psychological difficulties are often visible only when we have learned to look for them.
The Case for Therapy
We all experience psychological distress that can at times become impossible to deal with on our own. Friends and family care, but they have their own views and limits. Therapy offers something different: a professional relationship focused on your psychological life, with a perspective from outside the experience itself.
My Approach
My approach is psychodynamic. It works with unconscious patterns, internalised images of early relationships, trauma, relational dynamics, and defensive strategies that shape current difficulties. Understanding how these factors operate within you is the first step towards change. The second step involves modifying unproductive ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others by applying this understanding in everyday life. Both steps are outlined below.
The Process of Therapy
1. Developing Greater Insight
The development of greater psychological insight begins with talking about your current difficulties and the history that shapes them. Through this, your underlying patterns of thinking, feeling, and relating come into view as the present is linked to the past.
You may wonder how the past shapes the present. We all experience its influence when a remark or tone of voice evokes unexpected emotions, skewed perceptions or defensive responses. When a small remark produces an exaggerated reaction, the size of the reaction usually points to something older that has been touched.
You are encouraged to freely express your thoughts, feelings, and experiences in sessions. I offer interpretations, and your feedback helps to clarify how these patterns work and what they protect against. For example, we might explore how a difficulty saying ‘no’ maintains the approval once earned by being ‘good’ as a child.
Therapy brings into view the patterns that have been operating unconsciously, and the experiences from which they took shape. Understanding alone does not undo them, but it makes the changes that follow possible.
2. Applying Insight
Insight alone rarely produces change. Many people arrive at therapy expecting that understanding why they are the way they are will be sufficient, that once the source of a difficulty is identified, it will resolve. This expectation is intuitive, but does not match how psychological change actually occurs.
The patterns psychodynamic therapy addresses operate below awareness and are often formed early in life, before they could be understood or put into words. They are most active when you are under stress, in conflict, or close to someone, exactly the situations in which thinking clearly is hardest. Insight provides the map, but the work of interrupting the familiar response has to be done in the moment, again and again, until the new ways become established.
In practice, this looks like noticing the pull towards shutting down on a heavy day, and choosing one small action that contradicts the message that nothing matters. It looks like recognising that the fear of being judged in a meeting is older than the meeting, and entering the room despite the urge to disappear. It looks like noticing the impulse to withdraw when a partner expresses dissatisfaction, and staying with the conversation instead.
These are small movements, but repeated enough times they begin to reshape how you function. Technique-driven approaches aim at symptom relief, which can be valuable, but is rarely the whole answer. Psychodynamic therapy works underneath the symptom, on what the symptom is expressing and protecting against. The change it works towards is more fundamental.
Outcomes of Therapy
Three changes typically follow a course of psychodynamic therapy. Distress lessens because what once felt unmanageable can now be understood and addressed. The patterns that have been working against you, shaping your sense of self, decisions, and relationships, begin to weaken their hold. A more integrated understanding of how you function as you do takes shape, making different ways of being with yourself and with others possible.