About Sharon

I'm Sharon Nicholson — BACP Accredited Counsellor, Brainspotting Practitioner, and Certified Narcissistic Abuse Specialist™, with more than 20 years of experience as a therapist.

I specialise in the kind of relational trauma that leaves you highly functional on the outside, and quietly unlike yourself on the inside. The kind that forms slowly: in families, partnerships, systems, where your sense of self, your needs, or your perception of reality were consistently overridden.

And the kind that doesn't shift no matter how hard you work at it. No matter how much you understand it. No matter how capable you are in every other part of your life.

Having had my own lived experience of relational trauma, I understand what it means to be caught in a situation that subtly alters your sense of reality. I know the feeling of going through the motions of a life that looks fine but feels profoundly different inside. 

Sense of identity

Those I work with are outwardly capable, thoughtful, intuitive, and high-functioning, but privately struggling with anxiety, overthinking, and emotional exhaustion after difficult or emotionally damaging relationships and experiences.

They often describe feeling like they’ve lost themselves,  even if life on the outside still looks fine.

This can show up as:

• constant overthinking or self-doubt
• difficulty trusting your own perceptions
• emotional hypervigilance
• feeling responsible for other people’s emotions
• struggle to relax or feel safe in relationships
• a sense of disconnection from yourself

Often, this isn’t just anxiety in isolation, it’s what happens when you’ve spent a long time in emotionally unsafe or destabilising relational environments.

I am passionate about supporting others through these exhausting experiences because I know what is possible on the other side of it, and I have seen it become possible for others, again and again.

Before moving to full-time private practice, I dedicated nearly two decades to various therapeutic settings, including ten years as a BACP accredited therapist and Clinical Supervisor in the NHS, where I specialised in Counselling for Depression.

During this time, I also engaged in voluntary work within a Women's Refuge and provided counselling in bereavement services, and in further and higher education. 

Through years of sitting with those facing some of the most challenging life experiences, I learned repeatedly that healing is genuinely possible, even in circumstances that may seem completely unreachable from the inside. 

I established my private practice in 2007 and now work exclusively online with adults across the UK, primarily supporting women navigating the lasting effects of relational trauma, while welcoming clients of all genders. 

I offer Brainspotting intensives—focused, two or three-day formats that facilitate deeper work than typical weekly sessions—and 90-minute ongoing sessions for those who prefer a slower, more consistent therapeutic container. 

Both are delivered entirely online.

I came to Brainspotting as therapist first. Then I experienced it myself, and that changed everything. It helped me access and release things I hadn't realised I was still holding.

From that moment, I knew it needed to be at the centre of what I offer through online therapy. 

Brainspotting works where the story stops and the body begins. It's gentle enough to feel safe yet precise enough to reach what nothing else has. 

I weave it together with parts-informed therapy and somatic approaches, working with both the emotional story and the body's memory of it. 

Because thinking about it more is rarely the answer.

Like so many, I live with a chronic health condition, and I understand the complicated relationship we can have with our own bodies, with the idea of healing, and with the quiet fear that maybe this is just how it is now. 

I recognise the instinct to manage it alone, to keep going, and to tell yourself you're fine. But we were never meant to carry these burdens by ourselves. 

Asking for help, especially when every instinct says to just keep going, takes a particular kind of courage—one I have a great deal of respect for.

The shame we so often carry  from these experiences does not belong to us, and we really can release it.

Outside the therapy room, I'm a dancer, a dreamer, a doodler, and a deep thinker. I love sunsets, hot chocolate, the smell of coffee (but not the taste!), the sea on a blustery day, and films that stay with you long after the credits. 

There was a time when I didn't know what I loved, when I'd wandered so far from myself that joy felt genuinely out of reach. 

Being able to name these things now and share them with you, means more than I can say.

 🌿 "Sharon is a wonderfully warm therapist, who held a safe and open space for me in every one of our sessions. I felt like I could talk about anything, no matter how big or small." 

— Client experience