Tara McCloskey

Tara McCloskey is a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist who has been accredited by the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP). She mostly uses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) but she also uses other approaches such as Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) and Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Tara is experienced in working with adults and teenagers with depression and anxiety disorders such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Panic Disorder, Eating Disorders (Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa and Binge Eating), Post Traumatic Street Disorder (PTSD), Bipolar and many more.

Tara has experience in working with the NHS and working in the Private Sector. She engages in training regularly so she is able to use the most up to date evidence based approaches when working with clients, and so because of this, Tara makes sure each treatment plan is designed for each individual client. She has a Post-graduate Diploma in CBT and a BSc in Psychology. She also has an MSc in occupational Psychology. When working as an Occupational Psychologist Tara’s aim is to help organisations get the best performance from their employees while working in areas such as leadership, culture and change.

Tara McCloskey also conducts Psychometric testing which is the process of measuring relevant strengths and weaknesses to assess employment suitability. This helps us gain an accurate reading of the candidate’s cognitive personality/behavioural style.

Tara has experience in writing out reports and she has considerable experience communicating with Psychiatrists and GP’s when necessary. She writes medico-legal reports and covers topics such as immigration status, accident and mitigating circumstances for work and also University related issues.

Tara supervises psychological practitioners and she runs psychotherapeutic and psycho-educational groups. She is also bi-lingual, speaking Farsi and English.

Eating Disorder Expert

Tara is highly specialised in working with eating disorders. She has been working with eating disorders for the last four years in an IAPT service and has more recently moved to a Specialist Eating disorders service in south west London. In this service Tara has been using enhanced cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT-E) to work with a range of eating disorders including Anorexia, Bulimia, binge eating and other types of eating disorders which do not fit into these categories. Enhanced cognitive behavioural therapy is the latest version of the leading empirically supported treatment for eating disorders. This treatment is tailored to the needs of each client and can be adapted for adolescents also.

Tara McCloskey has also been running a group looking at Compassionate Mind/compassionate focused therapy (CFT) which has been proven to work well with patients with eating disorders who are extremely self-critical and lack self-compassion.

CFT is an approach which has been developed to help people who struggle with issues around shame and self-esteem (which are issues that have been found to be common in individuals suffering from eating disorders)

The aims of CFT are to help people build a more compassionate and less critical way of being with themselves and also others.

Whilst focus is on the eating disorder, Tara works with other presentations in order for the treatment to be successful such as depression, OCD, phobias, social anxiety, self-esteem issues, problems with alcohol and borderline personality disorder.