Rachel Kaye

Therapist Directory Listing Category: Psychotherapists and Counsellors

About the Therapist

About the therapist:

Hi, I’m Rachel (she/her), a counsellor and online therapist based in Shipley.

I specialise in working with LGBTQ+ clients and those who have always felt different in some way. I set up my practice to use my lived experience and training to provide high-quality, trauma-informed therapy to my community. You might not be coming to therapy to talk about your gender or sexuality, but you don’t want to spend your session time educating your therapist or worrying you’re being judged.

I have over 5 years’ experience as a therapist, including working for an LGBTQ+ charity, in private practice, and supporting staff and students at an FE college. My previous work in University and Arts settings and participation in activist/queer/feminist communities means I know first-hand the joys and challenges these spaces can bring.

I therefore have particular experience and interest in supporting clients facing workplace burnout and stress, navigating high pressure environments and work life balance, helping them to be their authentic selves.

My lived experience brings understanding of how anxiety and low self-esteem can make you feel like you’re broken, and my own journey has brought me proof that change is always possible.

Sexual identity:

Queer

Gender identity: Female

Gender history: As assigned at birth

Intersex: No

Neurodivergent: Unsure

Personal pronouns: She/Her

Qualifications - Links to websites:

Postgraduate Diploma - Counselling and Psychotherapy (Leeds Beckett University)

BACP member - 388130

Qualifications - Additional:

Award	Awarding body	Year of award

Experience and approach:

Are you struggling with anxiety or relationship difficulties and looking for queer affirming therapy?

You worry about everything, all the time, but particularly at night when you should be asleep. All this stress is starting to get overwhelming – what if you can’t get it together to go to work tomorrow? What if it gets so bad that you can’t do anything at all? Is this what a panic attack feels like?

You worry about relationships, the last time you saw your family, when you’ll have to see them again. You replay conversations and interactions in your head, cringing at all the things you did wrong. You don’t think you had a ‘bad’ childhood, relatively, but every time you see your family you end up feeling weird and it takes a while to come back around.

You worry that your romantic relationships are bringing your ‘stuff’ up (stuff about your sexuality, stuff about your ex, stuff about not being good enough,) but you also know that you don’t want to mess this up and be alone forever.

I offer LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy that can help you

- Learn to manage anxiety so it doesn’t stop you living, working and making friends.

- Stop sabotaging your relationships through your fears of getting close or constantly asking for reassurance.

- Improve your confidence so you can feel more sure of your decisions and stop holding yourself back.

Working with me will give you a relaxed and non-judgemental space to be heard. I use my knowledge of attachment, how trauma impacts our nervous system, and insights and hope from my lived experience, to help you work out what to do to feel better. I strive to make my practice as anti-oppressive as possible, providing therapy that is queer affirmative, trauma informed and neuro-affirming.

My counselling draws from a range of therapy models, include Relational Psychotherapy, Attachment-informed, Compassion and polyvagal/somatic (body-focused) approaches.

I understake regular training and CPD to keep my skills and knowledge up-to-date, with a focus on self-compassion, embodied mindfulness approaches and working with LGBTQ+/GSRD clients.

Approaches: