Mary Wilson- Verrall

I offer CAT therapy working in 50-minute weekly sessions and typically lasting 16 or 24 weeks. I also offer long-term, CAT-informed therapy. The process of a CAT therapy is to help us look at your patterns of relating, and the affect these patterns are having on your relationships, your work and the ways you understand yourself. The therapy marries together ideas from cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis, looking at your past events and experiences. The aim of our therapy is to understand together why you feel, think and behave the way you do, especially where this is causing difficulties in your present life. CAT focuses on the experiences you bring to the therapy and examines the deeper patterns with which you relate to others and react to problems. We consider the significance of past experience and relationships but also focus on current relationships and, importantly, your relationship patterns. How does your past relate to your ways of understanding yourself and others, and how can you use that understanding to make significant, important and lasting changes? I aim to form a trusting relationship with patients, allowing us to work together to explore your problems. We identify current problems and how they affect your life and wellbeing, look at the underlying causes of these problems in terms of your earlier life experiences and relationships. We work towards an understanding of how you learned to survive troubled feelings by relating to others and yourself in particular ways, discovering how these patterns may now be holding you back, and considering the ways you might do things differently and keep moving forward after our therapy has ended.

I am a trained Mental Health Nurse and qualified CAT therapist. For thirty years I have worked in a variety of NHS settings including Primary and Secondary Care mental health services and Crisis Services. I currently work as a therapist in a specialist NHS outpatient eating disorder service at the Maudsley Hospital, London.