What kinds of difficulties do you work with?

I work primarily with complex trauma, CPTSD, dissociation, neurodivergence, long-standing shame, difficulties in relationships, and the aftermath of psychiatric and systemic harm. People often come because other approaches have not made sense of what they are living with.

Do you offer online psychotherapy?

Yes. I currently work online, which allows people to access therapy from their own space. For many, this can support regulation and make it easier to engage with complex or painful material.

What is your therapeutic approach?

My work is trauma-informed, analytic and relational, drawing on psychoanalytic thinking, parts-based approaches and neuroaffirmative practice. The focus is on understanding how your nervous system and history have shaped the ways you survive, and finding more breathable options together.

How do I know if we are a good fit?

An initial consultation gives us space to think together about what you are looking for, what you have tried before, and what feels possible now. There is no expectation to commit beyond that if it does not feel right.

Do you work with diagnosis as the main focus?

Diagnosis can be part of the picture, but I do not treat people as diagnoses. The work is centred on your lived experience, your survival strategies and the conditions that have shaped you, rather than on fitting you into a diagnostic category.

Psychotherapy | Dr Jay Watts

Psychotherapy

TL;DR: Consultant Clinical Psychologist (25+ years experience) with personal experience, blending psychoanalytic, IFS, and body-oriented therapies across three specialist clinics: General Psychotherapy, Burnout & Creative Exploration, and CPTSD. My practice is warm, relational, neuroaffirmative, and queer/kink/sex-worker/recovery-inclusive. You're welcome to get in touch.

Psychotherapy is one of the wonderfully odder things we do — sitting together, week after week, reaching for what has never quite been safe to say or feel. It doesn't always make sense from outside. From inside, when it works, it can be both life-saving and life-affirming.

I run three clinics: a general psychotherapy clinic for individuals, couples and families; a clinic for creative exploration and burnout; and a specialist CPTSD clinic. All three combine depth psychotherapy with contemporary evidence-based approaches, and with somatic and arts-based work.

My Practice

I work with a wide range of difficulty — dread, panic, depression, dissociation, flashbacks, mood swings, addiction, burnout, relationships that keep going the same way, psychosis. Twenty-five years in, I've yet to find two people who need the same psychotherapy so we'll weave an integration that fits for you.

My work tends to be relational and psychoanalytic at its spine, with parts work (Internal Family Systems), creative work and trauma-focused, body-oriented methods woven in as the work asks for them — shaped around your system rather than imposed on it. All of it is informed by a long interest in language: the gap between what we mean, the words we find, and the body, which keeps its own account.

If I have one general aim, it's to help you feel safer in your body, in your relationships, and in the world — safe enough that your defences can sit back, and the parts of you that were forced backstage can come forward.

What Sessions Feel Like

Therapy should feel like it's always moving a little beyond what you already knew — not rushing there, but finding it together, in the space between us.

For some people the early work is practical: grounding, stabilising, putting enough distance between you and the distress that life becomes bearable again. That can be the whole of it. For others it's a doorway into something longer and more exploratory — the stories we tell ourselves, the patterns we return to, what dreams and slips of the tongue reveal. Most people I see settle somewhere in the middle, meeting once to three times a week.

We work toward what's been felt but not yet thought, lived but not yet told. Sometimes that means the body — a tightness that arrives when something gets close, a shutdown that speaks before words do, the feeling-tone of a memory that has no image. Sometimes it means the parts of you organised around survival and protection: not silencing them, but understanding what they carry, and what they might need now the conditions they formed under have changed.

Most people have spent years being one self in the room and another underneath — the underneath one carrying a shame it's never been safe to set down. When the work shifts, the distance between them starts to close. Not because you set out to close it. It just goes.

There's room for play here too; depth doesn't have to be relentlessly heavy. I work actively — I notice things, and I'll often name them. I won't push you somewhere you're not ready to go, and I won't look away from what hurts. I can stay with pain, and keep hold of what's possible for you while we do.

Who I See

People often come because they're living with:

Shutdowns, freezes, deadness, or going blank.
Extreme emotional states, or states that arrive without warning and feel impossible to come back from.
Dissociation, fragmentation, or part-states.
Patterns of use — drink, drugs, or other things — that have stopped feeling like a choice.
Not wanting to be alive, or hurting yourself in order to stay alive.
Relationships where control, coercion, fear or emotional abuse have become normal.
Long histories of feeling unheard, dismissed, or labelled.
The exhaustion of masking, adapting, performing okayness.
The anguish of wanting to be your own person in systems that don't make space for your reality.
Creative block or breakdown.
A persistent sense that life is happening slightly outside your reach.

My practice is proudly neuroaffirmative, and proudly queer-, sex-worker- and kink-positive. I frequently work alongside people who are in, or approaching, NA, AA, SLAA, SAA and other recovery fellowships as well as people in and out of hospital. No problem is too small or scary.

Experience

My own experience of life-changing mental collapse and neurodivergence shapes how I work — though not in the way people tend to assume. I hold it lightly. Experience isn't transferable: my breakdown is not yours, and a therapist who arrives with too firm a map of what collapse feels like will miss the person actually in the room. What it gives me is harder to name — a working knowledge of how difficult change is, and of how much it matters to be able to stay. With pain. With survival strategies that have outstayed their welcome. With the person in front of me, without needing them further along than they are.

I'm a Consultant Clinical Psychologist with a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology and more than 25 years in the field, with further training as a Lacanian analyst and in Systemic Psychotherapy and Internal Family Systems; my first training was in philosophy and the arts. Much of that career was in the NHS, where I led one of the country's largest integrative psychotherapy services, was Clinical Lead for a borough-wide Early Intervention for Psychosis service, and ran a pioneering Family Interventions for Psychosis project. I've supervised and trained psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists across five London teaching universities, keynote nationally and internationally on trauma, relational psychodynamics, and the embodied life of CPTSD, and publish in journals including The Lancet Psychiatry and the British Journal of Psychiatry.

People often tell me I'm warm, kind and funnier than they might have expected me to be (though not always intentionally)! I love what I do and I think it shows.

Fees & Access

Contacting a therapist can feel daunting. All enquiries are warmly welcome. You don't need to have it figured out before you write. A single line is enough. Email jay@jaywatts.co.uk and let me know whether you're enquiring about a standard or low-cost place. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

My standard fee is available on request. I also hold a significant number of genuinely low-cost places for people who couldn't otherwise access long-term therapy, and can share a list of low-cost clinics if my books are full.