Dr Susan Marshall

Susan is an experienced existential psychotherapist, registered with UKCP and a senior accredited member of BACP. Susan has been in practice as a psychotherapist and counsellor for over 20 years, working with a wide range of people and issues. She has a particular specialism in working with loss, and with those experiencing a crisis of meaning in their lives.

Susan trained with the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling (NSPC). She has a doctorate in existential psychotherapy and counselling, with her thesis exploring the emotions, thoughts and sensations of experiencing absurdity in the Covid-19 Pandemic and ensuing times — how people respond to this and live with or transform absurdity in the modern context.

Susan has practiced as a therapist across a diverse range of settings, including a mental health charity, the NHS, university services, and independent practice and is a clinical supervisor and trainer. Susan’s experience includes 17 years in Higher Education, providing clinical leadership for a university counselling, wellbeing and mental health service for students and staff, and clinical leadership for a workplace counselling service. Before training as a therapist, Susan worked in the arts, bringing a particular understanding of the creative process, and of the difficulties that arise when life feels out of step with what you value.

Areas of experience include:

• Grief, loss and bereavement
• Life crisis and life transitions
• Experiencing anxiety and depression
• Meaning and meaninglessness — including existential crisis, boredom and questions of purpose
• Contradictions, conflicting desires, and feeling pulled in different directions
• Living with uncertainty, a collapse of your world, and/or feeling stuck
• The impact of ill-health — your own, or that of someone you love
• Relationship issues (family, partners, friends, colleagues)
• Workplace difficulties, career redirection, “burnout,” retirement and living in line with your personal values

My approach

Whatever has brought you here now, it deserves to be taken seriously. I will work with you to face what needs to be faced, to ask meaningful questions of your life, and to tune into your own answers. With kindness, a steady presence, and an open manner, together we’ll work to clarify what's troubling you, what matters to you, and explore what your options might be. Through your openness to talk freely with me, we will endeavour to understand your experiences, in the past, in the present, and any sense you have of what lies ahead, if anything. Through this, a reorientation and a new or renewed commitment to the future can emerge and create a reconnection to life as expressed and lived by you.