Anne-Marie Nillo

Education and Qualifications

Anne-Marie is a trainee Counselling Psychologist at City University. She is a graduate member of the British Psychological Society (BPS) and a member of the Counselling Psychology division. She has gained a BSc in Psychology and a MSc in Research Methods in Cognitive Neuropsychology both from the University of Hertfordshire. She also has a Postgraduate Diploma in Psychological Therapies from London Metropolitan University.

Experience

Anne-Marie has over 13 years experience working in the NHS public sector. She comes from a diverse background working as an assistant psychologist in specialist psychological services, such as personality disorder, complex trauma, community forensics and mental health crisis teams. She was part of a pioneering project bringing together the public and third sector charity organizations, working in hostels creating psychologically informed environments for the homeless population in London. Anne-Marie currently works part time in the NHS secondary services, working with adults presenting with moderate to severe and enduring diverse mental health difficulties.

Anne-Marie has extensive experience working with a wide range of presentations. She has worked with people experiencing anxiety disorders, depression, OCD, and people with neurodivergence such as autism. In addition, she has worked extensively with people experiencing intense and overwhelming emotions, people experiencing difficulties in relationships/interpersonal difficulties, drug and alcohol problems, people with complex and traumatic histories and people with offending histories. She has worked with clients facing difference and diversity such as challenges around issues of sexuality, gender and learning difficulties.

Anne-Marie understands the impact and complexity the aforementioned challenges can have on individuals and is deeply committed to ensuring client’s therapy is unique and tailored to each person and their needs, whilst proactively working with clients to help achieve their goals.

Anne-Marie’s experience has enabled her to cultivate the skills of assessing and understanding people’s needs and being skilled in working with people with various socio-economic, ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Being of Filipino heritage and British born, she places emphasis on practicing with ethical awareness and cultural competency, especially thinking about issues such as race and ethnicity and challenging stereotypes. She has experience working with clients and their families/carers to work in a way that supports the family support system of clients in a holistic manner.

Outlook on Therapy

Anne-Marie’s stance comes across as being an approachable, warm, and compassionate practitioner. She strongly believes in creating a relational and collaborative therapeutic relationship, with this being central to beneficial therapeutic outcomes and the foundation of therapy with her clients. This means she understands the importance of creating an alliance that is based on trust, empathy, care, and respect. She understands the challenges around attending and committing to therapy, whether it be uncertainty, scepticism or financial. She therefore holds in mind how each client approaches and experiences the therapy process differently and therefore, adopts a way of working that suits the client to develop and foster a working relationship that will be supportive, collaborative, and empowering.

Treatment Approach

Anne-Marie is very client focused and understands the variety of needs people have will vary from person to person. She works with an integrative approach, using the current evidenced base for psychological therapy and practicing within the recommended National Institute for Care and Excellence (NICE) guidance. At the same time placing emphasis on taking a humanistic stance: seeing clients as humans beings and appreciating factors such as distress, loss and uncertainty are part of the human experience.

Anne-Marie’s experience of working with various presentations and complexity has enabled her to be an adaptable, flexible, and an ethically sound practitioner. She has used Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) with people experiencing anxiety and panic disorders and specialist approaches such as Exposure and Response Prevention for people with OCD. She also has experience with third wave CBT approaches such as Compassion Focused Therapy (which aims to help people who struggle with shame and self-criticism, often resulting from early experiences of abuse or neglect) and Acceptance Commitment Therapy (inviting clients to be open, curious about their feelings and experiences, and learning to sit with these, in order to help people move forward from difficulties in their lives and alleviate suffering).

Her doctoral training will also reinforce approaches such as Psychodynamic Therapy to think about how the past can influence client’s current problems, but also thinking about challenges within relationships and how to address these.

Anne-Marie has also co-facilitated therapy groups using Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) and Mentalization Based Therapy (MBT) and built on these techniques to use in individual therapy. Given her drive to expand psychological treatment to everyone, her experience includes being creative and tailoring evidenced based treatment to specific client populations, i.e., facilitating a Therapeutic Art Group using MBT principles or co-developing and facilitating a unique therapy group for men with anti-social personality disorder.

Whatever clients are presenting and experiencing, Anne-Marie ensures she is committed to clients and their therapeutic journey through being genuine and instilling hope in her clients.