About Joanne
Joanne Ruff is a counsellor with 15 years of experience working in the United Kingdom. She supports people dealing with anxiety, stress, grief, low self-esteem and depression. Her approach aims to make the first steps feel manageable for someone who is worried or unsure.
Joanne creates a calm space where people can talk about painful memories and current struggles without feeling judged. She focuses on listening closely and helping people understand how past relationships affect present feelings.
Background and approach
This can be helpful for issues linked to attachment, abandonment or patterns like codependency and avoidant personality traits. She uses approaches that centre the client's experience and that also address trauma that keeps returning in everyday life. Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing - EMDR - is one of the methods she uses to work through traumatic memories.
She also draws on attachment-based and client-centred ways of working to build trust and clarity. Joanne works with people facing a wide range of challenges, including chronic illness, caregiving stress, body image concerns and dissociation. She pays attention to how life events such as ageing, loss or disaster affect mood and coping.
Practical strategies and gentle reflection are combined in sessions to help people make changes that matter. People often come seeking relief from overwhelming emotions and a clearer sense of direction. Joanne aims to support and empower each person to set goals and try different ways of coping, step by step.
How Joanne’s approaches work online
Attachment-based work focuses on how early relationships shape current feelings and reactions, helping people notice patterns in close relationships and develop new ways of relating. Client-centred therapy places the person's own experience at the heart of sessions, with the counsellor offering empathic listening and reflection so the client can find their own solutions. EMDR - Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing - is used to help process disturbing memories that continue to cause strong emotional reactions in daily life.Choosing the right approach is part of the process and will be decided together. Joanne works collaboratively to match methods to a person's needs, goals and preferences, and may combine elements from different approaches as the work progresses.
Online therapy with video calls, phone sessions, live chat or text-based messaging offers flexibility for different circumstances. Video sessions are like in-person meetings and support visual contact, phone sessions can be useful when bandwidth is limited or a shorter check-in is needed, and messaging or live chat can help maintain steady contact between appointments. These formats make it easier to fit therapy around work, caregiving and other daily demands while keeping continuity of care.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Avoidant personality
- Body image
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Emptiness
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Impulsivity
- Intellectual disability
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Traumatic brain injury
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 15 years
- Licensed
- Languages
- English
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