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

Something has probably been difficult for a while. You might not have the words for it yet — only the weight of it, and a sense that you don't want to keep carrying it alone.

It might have arrived suddenly — an explosion, an implosion, a moment where something finally broke. Or it might be more like a slow, nameless dread that's been building for longer than you can say.

Either way, it brought you here. That matters.

My Practice

I work with people experiencing a wide range of psychological difficulties — anxiety, depression, dissociation, mood swings, interpersonal problems, psychosis. Some arrive with a question about life: a stuckness, a deadness, a creative block, a loss of purpose. Others arrive in acute crisis. I offer individual, couple, and family psychotherapy.

Different people need different things, and no single theoretical frame can hold that. My approach draws on analytic psychotherapy, parts work, and trauma-focused somatic methods — shaped around what your system actually needs, not a fixed formula imposed on it. I also offer specialist complex trauma (CPTSD) therapy for those who need it.

Psychotherapy consulting room with a blue modernist sofa, an armchair, modern art and an art deco l

The entrace to psychotherapy clinic - a cottage with a tree and welcoming bay plant

What Sessions Feel Like

A very old tree from Hampstead Heath with a gnarled bark that makes it look like its smiling

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

We work toward what's been felt but not yet thought, lived but not yet told. That might mean attending to something in 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. These aren't obstacles to the work. They're often where the most important things live, and we follow them carefully, at whatever pace your system can hold.

We work with self-states too — the parts of you organised around survival, around protection, around needs that never quite got met. Not to silence them or manage them from the outside, but to get curious about what they're carrying, what they've never been able to put down, what they might need now that the original conditions have changed.

Most people have spent years being one version of themselves in the room and another version underneath it — one that carries shame it has never quite been safe to put down. Sometimes, when something in the work shifts, the gap between what you've performed and what you've carried begins to close. Not as a goal. As something that happens.

There's room for play here too. For humour, for the sideways approach, for the unexpected connection that lands somewhere nothing direct could reach. Depth doesn't have to be relentlessly heavy.

I work actively. I notice things and I might gently name them. I won't push you somewhere you're not ready to go — but I'm not so carefully neutral that nothing real can happen either.

Who I See

People arrive here with very different things. What they often share is a sense that something essential hasn't been held elsewhere — or hasn't yet been tried at all.

What people tend to arrive with:

shutdowns, freezes, deadness or going blank
emotional states that arrive without warning and feel impossible to come back from
dissociation, fragmentation, or part-states
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

Whatever you're arriving with, I'll meet you there.

My practice is neuroaffirmative, and proudly queer-, sex-worker-, and kink-positive.

Experience

My own experience of life-changing mental collapse and neurodivergence shapes my clinical work, but not in the way people might assume. I hold it lightly. Experience is never transferable — my breakdown is not yours, and any therapist who arrives with too strong a map of what collapse feels like will miss the person actually in the room. What it does give me is something harder to name: a knowledge of quite how difficult change is, and 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 you without needing them to be further along than they are.

I'm a Consultant Clinical Psychologist with over 25 years' clinical experience, a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, and later training as a Lacanian analyst, in Systemic Psychotherapy, and in Internal Family Systems. My earlier background is in philosophy and the arts. I've led some of the UK's largest clinical services — including one of the country's biggest Integrative Psychotherapy Services and one of the first Early Intervention in Psychosis programmes — and have trained psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists across five London teaching universities. I'm regularly invited to keynote nationally and internationally on trauma, relational psychodynamics, and the embodied dimensions of CPTSD, and have published widely in this area, including in The Lancet Psychiatry and the British Journal of Psychiatry.

I love what I do — and I'm told that shows.

Fees &
Access

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

Contacting a therapist can feel daunting. All enquiries are warmly welcome — whatever your question, however small it feels. 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, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

Therapy is one of the stranger things humans do — sitting with someone, week after week, saying the things that have never quite been safe to say. It doesn't always make sense from the outside. From the inside, when it works, something that once had to be carried alone no longer has to be. And that is often life-changing.