About Me

I built this practice because I needed it and it didn't exist.

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

I specialise in relational trauma: the kind that doesn't come from a single event, but forms slowly — in families, partnerships, and systems where your sense of self, your needs, or your perception of reality were consistently overridden. 

The kind that leaves you highly functional on the outside, and quietly unlike yourself on the inside.

I know this territory from the inside. I have my own lived experience of relational trauma, including narcissistic abuse — the confusion, the exhaustion, the particular disorientation of trying to make sense of something that was designed not to make sense.

I understand what it is to appear capable and together, while something essential has quietly gone missing.

That is why I do this work. Not because I read about it — because I know what is possible on the other side of it.

Before moving to my private practice full-time, I spent over a decade working in demanding therapeutic settings — including 10 years as a BACP Accredited Senior Counsellor and Clinical Supervisor in the NHS, specialising in Counselling for Depression (PCE-CfD). I've worked within Women's Refuge, Further and Higher Education, and bereavement services.

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

What two decades of this work has taught me, consistently: healing is possible. 

And it can completely transform how you experience yourself and your life.

I came to Brainspotting professionally — and then experienced it personally. 

That changed everything.

It helped me access and release things I hadn't realised I was still holding. The kind of things that talking, understanding, and even years of prior therapy hadn't fully reached.

From that moment, I knew it needed to be the core of what I offer.

Brainspotting is a body-based, neuroscience-informed approach that works at the level where trauma actually lives — not just in memory, but in the nervous system, the body, and the parts of us that learned to stay quiet in order to survive. 

It is gentle, precise, and for many people, it reaches what nothing else has.

I integrate Brainspotting with parts-informed (IFS-informed) therapy and somatic relational approaches — creating a way of working that is attuned, thorough, and designed for depth.

I know from the inside what it is to carry something that is hard to name. To feel quietly unlike yourself and not quite understand why. To have tried to make sense of something that was, in part, designed not to make sense.

I also live with a chronic health condition — and I understand the complex, sometimes fraught relationship we can have with our own bodies, with diagnoses, and with the idea of healing itself.

The instinct to manage it alone can be fierce. Shame often insists we should. But healing was never meant to be solitary — and reaching out is not weakness. 

It is, in my experience, one of the most courageous things a person can do.

I'm a dancer, a dreamer, a doodler, and a deep thinker — intuitive and empathic by nature.

I love sunsets and expansive views, especially by the sea on a crisp, blustery day. I'm drawn to good books, to films that linger long after the credits roll, and to the simple, unguarded joy of dancing in my living room.

There was a time when I had no idea what I loved — when I had wandered so far from myself that joy felt genuinely out of reach. Being able to name these things now, and share them with you, is one of the most meaningful parts of my own journey.

If something in you recognises this work, you are welcome to book a free clarity call. There is no pressure, no expectation — just a conversation to explore whether this is the right fit.