About The Walled Garden: Trauma-Informed Counselling for Women and LGBTQ+ Clients
Welcome to The Walled Garden, an online counselling practice based out of London offering discreet, trauma-informed, somatic, and LGBTQ+ affirming support for women and LGBTQ+ clients.
Historically, a walled garden was a safe and cultivated space, enclosed to create the conditions for life to thrive. Within its boundaries, beautiful and rare things could grow with care, consistency, and protection from the harsher elements outside.
That is the intention behind this counselling.
Many of the people I work with are highly capable, accomplished, and deeply resilient. From the outside, their lives often look structured, successful, controlled, and enviable. Inside their walls, however, there may be exhaustion, anxiety, trauma, perfectionism, emotional disconnection, or the strain of constantly holding everything together.
The Walled Garden exists as a space where that internal experience no longer has to be managed or performed alone. I believe that you already have the innate wisdom you need to heal; I am here to guide you on your journey through your garden, provide a safe space where you feel heard, and help reveal your path to healing.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Trauma-Informed Counselling That Works With the Mind & Body
My approach integrates traditional psychotherapy techniques such as Psychodynamic, CBT, DBT, and Jungian models with Somatic Experiencing®-informed practice, alongside contemporary relational and trauma-informed psychology tools and ancient healing wisdom.
This means our work does not stay only in talking, understanding, or intellectually analysing patterns. We also attend to how experiences are held in the nervous system: in patterns of tension, collapse, overactivation, disconnection, and survival adaptation that often persist even when someone cognitively understands their story. I will help teach you how to hold space for yourself through understanding patterns in your mind and body. As each individual is unique, the psychological models used to help each client will be unique as well.
For many clients, therapy has already involved a great deal of talking, reflecting and making sense of things, without meaningful change in their day-to-day emotional experience, relationships, or internal state. My focus is on helping you move beyond that point.
This work is oriented toward change that is felt in the everyday. That may include breaking long-standing relational and emotional patterns, regulating the nervous system more effectively, supporting a shift from chronic survival strategies into a more integrated and flexible way of living, creating healthier and more meaningful relationships, or simply learning to feel safe feeling more joy day-to-day.
You can read more about this approach on the Somatic Therapy page.
“To free the voice is to free the person.”
More About Katherine Yeilding, GMBPsS: Going From Performance to Psychology
Before obtaining my Master’s in psychology, my initial fascination with human behaviour developed through acting and performance. I became deeply interested in the emotional architecture of people’s lives: the roles we learn to inhabit, the ways we adapt to be accepted, and the parts of ourselves we conceal in order to feel normal, successful, or safe. I was always fascinated with why people are the way they are. That early curiosity gradually evolved into formal psychology training.
After relocating to the United Kingdom, I completed my Master’s degree in Psychology at Regent’s University London, where my academic and clinical focus centred on trauma, identity, relational dynamics, and LGBTQ+ mental health. I have also undergone specific counselling training courses.
My work is informed by current research into the lived experiences of women, queer women, lesbians, and LGBTQ+ individuals navigating visibility, intimacy, belonging, achievement, and emotional wellbeing in complex social and professional environments.
I have also contributed to published research exploring LGBTQ+ mental health and identity, including work examining relational experience, minority stress, and wellbeing within queer communities.
Read Our Most Recent Publication
LGBTQ+ Affirming Counselling, Rooted in Research & Care
My practice is intentionally designed for women and LGBTQ+ clients who are seeking a space that is both emotionally intelligent and research-backed.
This is LGBTQ+ affirming counselling that understands identity, trauma, relationships, and the body as deeply connected. It is a space for clients who may be exploring sexuality, queer identity, internalised expectations, relational authenticity, burnout, perfectionism, or the long-term effects of living in survival mode.
Discretion is always top of mind in my practice. Because my counselling services are private, there is no requirement to automatically send records to your NHS GP, which means that our work stays confidential. For many professionals I work with, that is an important part of feeling able to speak openly. My goal is never to fit you into a diagnosis category or judge you. Instead, the goal is for me to guide you to a place where you are living well.
This is counselling focused on helping you understand how your patterns formed in the past, how they are maintained in the body and mind today, and how they can begin to change going forward.
You may also want to explore LGBTQ+ Affirming Counselling, Coming Out Later in Life, or Body Positive Counselling.
“Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.”
In The Walled Garden, Our Work May Involve:
Trauma, nervous system regulation, and resourcing
Somatic therapy and embodied awareness
Breaking entrenched relational, and behavioural patterns
High-functioning anxiety, perfectionism, and internal pressure
Identity, self-worth, and internalised expectations
Sexuality, queer identity, and relational authenticity
Burnout, emotional exhaustion, and chronic overextension
Intimacy, attachment, and relational safety
Reconnecting with embodied experience after long periods of survival-based functioning
Above all, this practice is built on the understanding that intellectual insight alone is often not enough for true and impactful change. Like a garden, meaningful transformation requires the right conditions for the nervous system, the body, the relational self, and the mind to reorganise safely over time and bloom.
You only need to arrive willing to begin tending to your garden in a new way.
