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Individual Counselling Therapy
You are very good at performing fine.
Sometimes you are not, you just have flashes of brilliance.
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You have built a career, a reputation, possibly a whole identity around being capable, competent, and together. You show up. You deliver. You smile through the meetings. And then you get home and feel like none of it is you.
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That is not a personal failing, it's masking. And it is remarkably common among high-achieving neurodivergent, ADHD, and queer professionals. Research by Raymaker et al. (2020) found that neurodivergent individuals who mask consistently report significantly higher rates of burnout, anxiety, and loss of identity. Performing success costs. It costs you.
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Individual counselling at Unique Conversations is where you stop paying that price.
I know what this exhaustion feels like
I am Claire, a French counsellor and coach who has landed in England and spent her entire life between two cultures with entirely opposite approaches to emotional honesty.
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The French will tell you exactly what is wrong with your life, your lunch, and your parking, in that order.
The British will notice something is catastrophically wrong and offer you a cup of tea and a biscuit. Neither is especially useful when you are trying to understand yourself.
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Working bilingually, across cultures, and at the intersection of neurodivergence, queerness, and high performance is not just my specialism. It is the lens I have always looked through.
When you tell me you are performing a version of yourself that everyone accepts but nobody actually knows, I do not nod politely and make a clinical note. I know exactly what you mean from the inside.
This is not just therapy for people who are falling apart
It is therapy for people holding everything together so impressively that no one, including themselves, has noticed the cost.
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Perhaps you are lying awake at 11pm reading another ADHD article, unsure whether you are finally understanding yourself or catastrophising again. Perhaps nothing specific is wrong. You are somehow managing. Maybe managing was not supposed to be the whole point.
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If you have tried therapy before and it did not work, I understand the hesitation. Many clients arrive having felt technically heard and fundamentally misunderstood.
Here, sessions are tailored entirely to you, not built for a neurotypical client having a difficult year.
The French call it du sur mesure.
The British say we muddle through together, both are accurate.
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Up to 50% of adults with ADHD also experience anxiety as a consequence of years of unrecognised difficulty (Kessler et al., 2006).
LGBTQ+ individuals are twice as likely to experience a mental health condition in their lifetime (Stonewall, 2018). These are normal and predictable consequences of spending years performing someone else.
What becomes possible
Clients arrive managing.
They leave with self-trust, the real kind, not the polished version that exhausts you: The kind that means decisions without spiralling, boundaries without guilt, and a life that actually fits.
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Authenticity is a practice, one you are entitled to build, in English or in French, or Franglais at whatever pace your nervous system can sustain.
What happens next
Reach out.
We begin with a free 20-minute consultation, no pressure, no prepared speech required.
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A first session is simply a conversation, with someone who has heard a great deal, judges very little, and makes excellent coffee.
In person in Wigan.
Walk and Talk Therapy for Women
Online across the UK and internationally.
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You do not need to arrive sorted. You just need to arrive.
Thérapie pour les Francophones et expatrié(e)s
Nouveau pays, nouvelle culture, nouveau script de vie, et quelque part dans ce déménagement soigneusement organisé, vous avez laissé derrière vous les gens qui vous connaissent vraiment.
Ce qui s'installe ne ressemble pas toujours à de la solitude, plutôt à une désorientation permanente, au sentiment de jouer un rôle sans avoir tout à fait le texte. La recherche montre que la perte de repères en migration fragilise directement l'identité et amplifie l'anxiété (Berry, 2005).
La thérapie ici, c'est d'abord un endroit où vous pouvez râler en français, en franglais, sans vous justifier, et ensuite aller plus loin : retrouver qui vous êtes dans ce nouveau contexte, transformer votre singularité en force sur le marché du travail britannique. Si vous traversez tout cela en couple ou en famille, mieux communiquer sous la pression pour avancer ensemble plutôt qu'en parallèle.