Deep Work Therapy
- Structured therapeutic work, developed by Sally Baker over two decades, for profound, lasting change
- Ideal for high-functioning adults, executives who’ve ‘done therapy’, but have been unable to resolve it and release their core issues
The patterns that run your life were built for safety, not to create your happiness. This is for those who look fine on the outside, whereas on the inside, the nervous system tells another story.
When understanding the problem hasn’t been enough to change it
You can understand exactly why you feel the way you do and still find yourself having the same emotional response.
That’s because insight and emotional change are not always the same thing.
The patterns that run our lives were often built around protection and emotional safety. They can continue long after they’re useful, even when the rational part of you knows perfectly well that something is no longer necessary.
This is the work I specialise in.
I’ve spent more than 25 years working therapeutically with people who want more than strategies for managing how they feel. My Deep Work Therapy programme is structured one-to-one work designed to identify and change the emotional patterns underneath the problem.
The presenting problem may be different, but the question underneath is often remarkably similar:
Why am I still reacting like this when part of me knows better?
Why doesn’t understanding the problem always change it?
Because an emotional response isn’t simply a thought.
- You can know that the lift is safe and still feel panic when the doors close.
- You can know that the food is safe and still be frightened you’ll be sick.
- You can know that a relationship has ended and still feel your whole body react when something reminds you of it.
- You can know that a medical procedure is necessary and still experience overwhelming dread.
Logic isn’t failing. It’s simply trying to solve something that isn’t being generated by logic alone.
My work focuses on the emotional responses, associations and learned patterns that continue to signal danger even when your conscious mind knows differently.
How is Deep Work Therapy different?
I don’t begin with the assumption that you need to become better at coping with the problem.
I want to understand what is keeping the problem emotionally alive.
That means identifying the particular feelings, memories, associations and protective responses involved rather than treating everything as one enormous issue.
Sometimes we work almost like emotional detectives.
Something described initially as ‘my anxiety’, for example, may contain several quite different emotional responses. Once we separate them, we can work much more precisely.
I use a range of neuroscience-informed therapeutic approaches, including memory reconsolidation, somatic interventions, emotional safety work, and Orpheus Mind Technologies.
Where appropriate, I can also work content-free. You don’t necessarily have to tell me every detail of what happened for us to work with the emotional response attached to it.
The methods are chosen around you rather than expecting you to fit yourself around a particular therapeutic model.
Who is this for?
Many of the people I work with are highly capable.
They function. They work. They manage families and responsibilities. Other people may have absolutely no idea how difficult things feel underneath.
Some have already spent years understanding themselves through therapy but still experience emotional responses they cannot think their way out of.
Others come to me because something has happened that has completely changed how safe they feel in themselves or in the world.
I regularly work with
- exhausted from social or health anxiety, emotional overload or rumination
- emetophobia and gag response
- compulsive behaviours
- repeating negative emotional loops that feel older than they are
- perfectionists, overwhelmed or unable to switch off
- adult survivors triggered by old trauma
- the continuing impact of experiences from childhood
I also work with people dealing with
- relationship breakdown
- divorce, loss and bereavement
- loss and bereavement
- confidence and self-esteem
- emotional eating
- addiction
- the emotional impact of serious or life-limiting medical conditions
Deep Work Therapy is ideal for clients who recognise that their emotional challenges are deeply felt and have endured for a long time, often since childhood. Equally, they may have experienced a life-changing event and need expert help to recalibrate how they think and feel about themselves.
This also includes
- Adult survivors of sexual abuse
- Trauma survivor
- Depression and suicidal ideation
- Living with chronic or life-limiting medical conditions, including cancer, Diabetes, MS, and Fibromyalgia
- Cancer during treatment or post
- Alcohol and/or Class A drug misuse and addiction
- Confidence and self-esteem issues
- Sexual problems
- Irritable bowel syndrome
Specially selected resources can be offered between sessions that ensure your subconscious mind is working with you to achieve the results you desire. Daily support with the specialist techniques you will learn and use for self-management and ongoing outcomes.
Why it works
Sally Baker works with the latest neuroscience therapy approaches at the level where emotional patterns are stored. The fight-or-flight responses are rooted in the reptilian brain, where neither logic, outsmarting, nor willpower can change them.
This means using:
- memory reconsolidation
- Orpheus Mind Technology
- somatic interventions
- emotional-safety frameworks
- predictive-brain principles
This is not coping-skills therapy.
This is not about managing symptoms.
It is a transformation at the source.
What does change look like?
That depends on what brought you to therapy.
Sometimes the emotional response that has been causing a problem can reduce dramatically or disappear.
With other experiences, particularly grief, loss or serious illness, the goal isn’t to erase a normal human emotion.
Change might instead mean greater emotional distance, less overwhelm, being able to function differently or no longer having your life organised around avoiding particular feelings.
I am interested in what would need to feel, look or become different for you to know that something had genuinely changed.
That’s one of the questions we establish at the beginning.
What’s included
- Deep Work Therapy is a programme of six 90-minute individual sessions
- Sessions can take place weekly or fortnightly
- I work online with clients throughout the UK and internationally, with face-to-face sessions in London by arrangement
- The work may include memory reconsolidation, somatic interventions, emotional regulation techniques and other therapeutic approaches selected according to what we’re working with
- Where useful, I’ll also provide individually selected resources and techniques between sessions to support the work we’re doing together
Investment
The investment is £2,200 for six 90 minute sessions.
Before making any commitment, we begin with an obligation-free Discovery Call.
What happens on the Discovery Call?
You don’t need to prepare your entire life story.
I want to understand what’s happening now, what you’ve already tried and what you would like to be different.
You can ask me questions about how I work, and I’ll tell you whether I think my approach is appropriate for what you’re dealing with.
The purpose isn’t to persuade you into therapy.
It’s for both of us to decide whether working together makes sense.
Book an obligation-free Discovery Call if you believe you could benefit from this Deep Work Therapy approach.
