The Storm’s Edge Birth
The name “Storm’s Edge Therapy” was developed with an organisational consultant to represent the core of our work. Our service embraces the fact that when struggling, it is stormy: turbulent, messy, volatile, scary and dark. We meet that starting mental state and work from that real point forward, rather than playing the polite and pretend game that they are forced to play outside of the therapy relationship. Our clients start on the edge of a storm, the edge of functioning and often the edge of society. We work together to navigate the storm toward healing the person, but not necessarily towards conforming to society. You remain with whatever type of storm is right for you, but you learn new ways to navigate your life, relationships, and goals.
We opened in October 2016 with the explicit aim of supporting 3 key groups that are still underserved by the Psychology and mental health profession. Firstly, the most frustrating and heartbreaking inspiration for the practice was the many people with personality disorders who fall through a very big crack. Either they are so severe and struggling that they need to be an inpatient or receive specialist services. Or they are not severe enough to receive any specific support. And research tells us consistently that treatment as usual does not work with personality disorders. It is also likely to make people feel and function worse. So we went to build a service that has specialist treatment for people struggling with the traits and characteristics of personality disorder, but who do not meet the threshold for specialist local NHS services.
Second, we are working with people who are neurodiverse, again because this group is underserved as adults. There is existing support for children and adolescents, but once you leave school and must deal with the difficulties of adult life, there is little to no support. Also, much of the support a gifted or neurodivergent person receives early in life focuses on education or behavioural management. This is problem-solving rather than identity- and self-worth-building. As a differently organised adult moving through the world, you really need to understand yourself; otherwise, the first step you take is to lose yourself.
Our third area of speciality from day one was working with people in the creative industry. This came into sharper focus because the practice was set up physically in Farringdon/Clerkenwell, the hub of the media industry. Nevertheless, people in the creative industry fit our overall philosophy: working with people who think differently and experience the world in ways that stand significantly outside the majority views of the general population. The founding ethos of Storm’s Edge Therapy recognises that people with a different cognitive profile need adjustments to therapeutic methods and tools.
Storm’s Edge Therapy is a UK-based private psychological practice offering a wide range of therapies and interventions. We have years of effective experience treating the core of psychological disorders and difficulties like trauma, depression, anxiety, substance misuse, relationship and career struggles. However, over these last 10 years, we have also developed specific areas of deeper speciality like eating disorders and couples’ therapy.
The Building of a Team
Dr Alecia Anderson joined the practice in 2019 and has been with us for seven of our ten years. A Chartered Counselling Psychologist, she leads our depression work and brings EMDR alongside a pluralistic approach that refuses to treat any single model as superior. Her clinical interests sit close to the centre of why this practice exists: borderline and antisocial presentations, clients who are narcissistically defended, treatment-resistant depression, childhood emotional neglect and trauma bonding. She also works with gifted adults on social integration and career development, and with questions of cultural identity, discrimination and crisis of faith that most services have no room for.
"Being able to stay alongside someone while they test out whether it is safe to trust, to be vulnerable and eventually to do something different is something I find incredibly rewarding." Dr Alecia Anderson
In September 2024 we were joined by Dr Sonya Tsancheva, a Chartered Clinical Psychologist who leads our Eating Disorder Clinic. Her specialism is the overlap between physical and psychological presentation, including medically unexplained symptoms and the psychological dimensions of physical health conditions. That boundary is one our client group crosses constantly and one most services are not built to hold. She works psychoanalytically, is an accredited Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy practitioner, and brings nine years across mental and physical health settings in the NHS. She is also trained in group and organisational work, and sees adults and adolescents in English and Bulgarian. Her description of her own client group, adults struggling with relationships and feeling as though they do not fit with others, could stand as a description of this practice.
"I find it particularly rewarding when a patient I am working with finds a new meaning to their familiar experiences." Dr Sonya Tsancheva
In 2026 Tina Refning Larsen joined the core team, bringing more than two decades in the field of giftedness. She was gifted children coordinator for Mensa Denmark, founded the Danish national Gifted Children Association, led an independent school for gifted children and managed the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children's world conference. She is now in the final year of combined training in counselling psychotherapy and clinical psychology, converting her deep experience into therapeutic work with gifted adults: masking, unused potential, underachievement, perfectionism and the work of finding purpose. She works pluralistically, with parents of gifted children as well as with adults, in Danish and English. Few people have spent as long inside the question of what gifted people actually need, and very few have come at it from both education and therapy.
Behind the scenes, we have had the honour of 10 years of supervision by Dr Paul Cundy. He is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychodynamic Psychotherapist who worked in the NHS for 18 years. He currently teaches at UCL and works in private practice. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the peer reviewed journal Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Dr Cundy's guidance on each member of the team over these years. Undoubtedly, each one of our clients has benefited from the depth and breadth that he brings to our case formulations and treatment directions.
Ongoing training and supervision are vital to any practice in a rapidly evolving field during a time of revolutionary change. However, this is even more true for a team that works with people at the margins of society, where their understanding and treatment options consistently receive the least research. In addition to using available research and training resources, we meet weekly and host monthly group peer supervision for therapists working with Gifted Adults and the Neurodiverse population.
Online Therapy Built on Experience, Not Circumstance
Storm's Edge Therapy has been delivering clinical sessions via video call since 2017, nearly three years before the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic prompted a wholesale shift in how psychological services were delivered across the profession. For us, this was not a reactive measure, but a deliberate and considered response to the nature of the specialist work we do. Our psychologists work with disrupted personalities, gifted and twice-exceptional individuals across the full range of neurodiverse presentations as well as with older adolescents navigating the particular complexities that these profiles can present at that stage of life.
Because this work occupies a genuinely specialist area, our client base has never been geographically contained. Many of our clients are professionals who live and work internationally, crossing borders regularly and requiring uninterrupted continuity of therapeutic support regardless of where they are in the world. Building a rigorous, professionally managed framework for online working was an early and integral part of how Storm's Edge Therapy was designed to operate.
When the pandemic arrived in 2020, many psychological services faced significant and prolonged disruption: sessions were suspended, transitions were difficult, and both practitioners and clients faced the challenge of adapting to a medium that was entirely new to them. Storm's Edge Therapy experienced none of this. Our clients saw no interruption to their care and minimal reduction in the quality or consistency of their sessions. The clinical infrastructure, the professional processes, and the practitioner experience required to deliver effective therapy online were already embedded and well tested. If the pandemic demonstrated anything to us, it was not that remote working was possible, but that the decision to establish it early, and to do so with proper clinical rigour, had been the right one. That foundation continues to serve our clients well, and it remains central to how we work today.
The global reach of Storm's Edge Therapy is a direct reflection of the specialist nature of our clinical expertise and of the significant gap that exists in local and national services in most countries when it comes to evidence-based support for personality disorders and neurodivergent individuals. Our clients are drawn from across the United Kingdom and Europe, as well as from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Israel, Morocco, Dubai, and Australia; a breadth that speaks to the scarcity of specialist provision in this area worldwide. All of our psychologists are registered with both the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and the British Psychological Society (BPS). As Clinical Director, I am also an Affiliate Member of the American Psychological Association (APA) and a Registered Supervisor on the BPS Register of Applied Psychology Practice Supervisors (RAPPS).
Evolving Clinical Focus
Specifically, the work at the intersection of neurodiversity and personality disorder, a globally underrepresented area of both research and clinical practice and it is, in part, this specialism that draws clients to Storm's Edge Therapy from across the world. Working with a wide range of people from an equally varied number of cultures means that the team needs to be ready for the spectrum of mental health, relational and career struggles that come with the world as it is today. Nevertheless, our particular client focus has meant fully engaging with intersectionality and marginalisation, expanding our special areas from the core three of our starting point.
Our core client group remain those with disrupted personality profiles, people within the neurodiversity community and the broad arena that is the creative and talented. Nevertheless, these groups also meaningfully overlap with the LGBTQIA+ community and numerous other people or issues that sit outside the normative social network: for example, males with eating disorders, male victims of sexual assault, non-heteronormative relationship structures, etc. Starting Storm’s Edge Therapy with the aim of working with these turbulent populations has led to much valuable and vital work with family members and carers when it has not been possible or best to work directly with the person in the centre of the storm. In our hyper-individualistic societies and, sometimes hyper-individualistic therapy culture, we see the powerful benefits of understanding that we are part of families and communities and cultures.
What a Decade Corrected
Not everything we built worked. Two of our larger undertakings failed, and they failed in the same way.
During Covid, when a great many practitioners were starting groups and webinars, we developed online group therapy around stress management, depression and anxiety. We put considerable time into the infrastructure, the content and the marketing. We ran a few sessions with very little attendance, and none of the groups gained momentum. Between us we had spent hundreds of professional hours running psychotherapy and psychoeducation groups, so this was work we were equipped for and work we wanted to offer.
We then developed a specialist depression clinic, with psychoeducation, specialist intake assessments, online forms and accompanying materials, promoted through our website and social media for well over two years. It gained no traction either. Both of us had well over a decade of experience with depression across its full range, from severe presentations in hospital settings through to primary care, and including the depressive elements of other conditions such as personality disorder and addiction.
Both times we were qualified, resourced and, we believed, well positioned against a real need. Both times the effort was substantial and the result was nothing. We still cannot fully explain why.
What we can see is what the two had in common. Both were built for a general audience rather than for the people we set out to serve. Storm's Edge Therapy works because it is specialist, and the times we have stepped outside that specialism to build something broader are the times we have found no one waiting. Since then the same energy has gone into resources shaped for our own client groups: the blog library, the eBooks and therapeutic tools, and the monthly peer supervision group for therapists working with gifted and neurodiverse adults. Those have grown steadily.
Resources
Since the launch in 2016, we have uploaded regular blogs on topics that we feel are relevant to our clients, either aimed at building deeper self-understanding or to help them make greater progress with their symptoms. From launching blogs on Borderline Personality Disorder and Audition Anxiety, we have continued to offer resources aligned with our three core client groups with topics like “Borderline Personality Disorder in the Media”, “Don’t let your worst review define you” and “The Changing Role of Neurodiverse People: Are We at a Turning Point?”.
In addition to the growing collection of blogs, we used social media platforms to share ideas and resources aimed at enhancing mental health and raising awareness. For over 5 years, we are fortunate to have had the capable and creative services of the team at The Social Butterfly for our media presence and online technical support. Their understanding of the changing technology and media landscape has been invaluable as their guidance and hard work have allowed the therapy team to focus on our core work while also extending our messages of health and healing beyond the confines of one-to-one therapy.
Our contributions have expanded and evolved over the decade from those early blogs to social posts to now include five eBooks on the site and children’s books available on Amazon. In 2024, we were invited by longtime partners in the field of Neurodiversity, InterGifted, to join Founding Director, Jennifer Harvey Sallin, on their podcast “Conversations with Gifted Trauma”. We have had a meaningful and supportive relationship with the InterGifted team since 2021, leading to collaborations and reciprocal referrals.
To explore our thinking in greater depth, we invite you to visit our blog and resource library at [stormsedgetherapy.co.uk], where you will find articles and eBooks addressing neurodiversity, giftedness, and online therapy. You may also wish to listen to the podcast, Conversations with Gifted Trauma, in which Kael explores the relationship between giftedness and personality disorder in conversation with guests and colleagues — available at stormsedgetherapy.co.uk/conversations-with-gifted-trauma-podcast.
