Dr. Stephanie Mace

Therapist Directory Listing Category: Psychotherapists and Counsellors

About the Therapist

About the therapist:

I am a qualified psychotherapist with over ten years of experience working in clinical and research contexts, including within the NHS. My doctoral research examined how people talk about sensitive and marginalised experiences in healthcare interactions, with a particular focus on psychosexual communication.

My practice is informed by both psychotherapy and research, which allows me to work with sensitivity to language, silence and emotional nuance. I am interested in how personal experiences are shaped not only by individual histories, but also by relational, cultural and social contexts.

I work with adults across a range of concerns, including anxiety, low mood, relationship difficulties, identity questions, body image, trauma, chronic illness and psychosexual issues.

Sexual identity:

Lesbian
Other

Gender identity: I use another term

Gender history: Prefer not to say

Intersex: No

Neurodivergent: No

Personal pronouns: she/her

Qualifications - Links to websites:

PhD. in Clinical communication and Psychosexual Health

MSc. in Counselling Psychology

Registered member of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP)

www.stephaniemace.co

Qualifications - Additional:

Award	Awarding body	Year of award
MSc. Counselling Psychology	Keele University	2015
PhD in clinical communication and psychosexual health	University of Manchester

Experience and approach:

My approach is psychodynamic and relational. I understand psychological suffering not simply as a set of symptoms, but as something produced through histories of attachment, unconscious conflict and social inscription. In therapy, we may explore how past relationships are replayed in the present, how desire and shame are negotiated, and how certain aspects of the self become split off, disavowed or silenced.

I pay close attention to transference and countertransference — the emotional currents that emerge within the therapeutic relationship itself — and to how language both reveals and conceals experience. Therapy can become a space where familiar patterns are slowed down, questioned and reworked, rather than simply managed.

I do not approach therapy as a technique for optimisation or self-improvement. Instead, I aim to create a space where ambivalence, contradiction and complexity are allowed to exist. Change, when it occurs, tends to be subtle, uneven and deeply relational.

Approaches: