I worked for over twenty-five years in the financial world, primarily as an actuary, before I retrained as a counselling psychologist. Many of my clients now include people I would have sat next to in a previous life: actuaries, data scientists, underwriters, brokers, accountants, bankers, management consultants, IT consultants and the people in compliance and risk who hold them all together. They come to therapy with stories that share a particular shape, and I want to describe that shape here.
If you work in finance and you are wondering whether therapy might help, this piece is meant to make the prospect a little more concrete.
The pressures most therapists do not see
Finance work has a few characteristics that mark it out. The hours are long and unpredictable. Performance is measured constantly and visibly. You can have a year that determines a decade. Markets do not care about your sleep. There is a fiduciary weight to the decisions you make, and a regulatory layer that watches you make them. Compensation can be high, which makes it harder to leave when something starts to feel wrong.
A generalist therapist will hear all of this and they will care, but they may also flinch slightly at the pace, the language, the apparent ruthlessness of the environment. They may try to slow you down before they have understood what is actually happening to you. That is not a criticism of the profession. It is a function of unfamiliarity. The financial workplace is not most people's reference point, and the way it shapes a person is not obvious from the outside.
I do not flinch. I know what an annual performance review feels like, and what a bonus year feels like, and what it feels like to be carrying client money. I do not need you to translate.
The patterns I see most often
A few patterns recur. Not all of them will fit you, and the absence of any of them does not mean you are not struggling.
Perfectionism that has become its own problem. The same exacting attention that helped you progress becomes a constant low-grade hum of self-criticism. Mistakes that would not register in another field become difficult to put down. Sleep starts to suffer.[1]
An identity tied very tightly to performance. A bad week becomes a referendum on whether you are the person you thought you were. Time off feels unsafe. Holidays are spent preparing to return.
Alcohol or substances doing the work that rest used to do. This one is rarely the presenting concern. It comes up in passing, often in the context of socialising or "winding down". It is worth looking at.
Relational fallout. Partners who feel they are competing with the firm for your attention. Children who have learnt not to interrupt. Friendships outside the industry that have quietly thinned out.
The shape of moral injury, even where the work itself is ethical. Watching things you cannot change. Holding information you cannot share. Selling what you have come to suspect was the wrong product. This is a real and underdescribed form of distress.[2]
What therapy with someone who knows the industry can offer
When the therapist is fluent in the work, three things change.
First, the early sessions are shorter. We do not need to spend three weeks establishing what your job actually is. We can move toward what is happening to you in it.
Second, the work itself becomes available as material. A client meeting that did not go well can be unpacked the way a difficult intimate exchange can be unpacked. The same psychological tools apply.
Third, I am not threatened by the size of the question. Whether to leave the industry, whether to step back from a senior role, whether to keep going, whether to retrain. I have made some of those decisions myself. I will not push you toward an answer, but I will not be alarmed by the question.
What the work tends to look like in practice
I am trained in several modalities. With finance professionals I most often draw on Schema Therapy[3][4], which is unusually good at the kind of long-standing perfectionism and self-criticism that high-performing environments select for. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can help where panic, sleep, or specific avoidance is in play. EMDR is useful where there is either a single overwhelming event sitting underneath everything else: a market crash, a redundancy round, a regulatory investigation or more deep seated relational patterns that other approaches are not touching.[5] Person-centred work runs underneath all of it.
Most clients come weekly to start with, then taper. Some prefer fortnightly from the outset. Sessions are fifty minutes. Some are online (Microsoft Teams), some are in person at Bayswater or Chancery Lane in central London. Most of my finance clients do a mix.
Who this suits, and who it does not
It suits people who want to think rather than be reassured. It suits people who can tolerate, eventually, looking at the parts of themselves that have made them successful and asking whether those parts are still serving them.
It does not suit people seeking a coach. Coaching is a different intervention. It does not suit anyone in acute crisis: the right step there is your GP, NHS 111, or the Samaritans on 116 123. And it does not suit anyone whose primary issue is problem gambling, where Gamblers Anonymous and specialist services have stronger evidence than I do.
How to start
If you would like to test whether we might work well together, the first step is a free ten-minute consultation. We use it to talk through what you are bringing and whether I am the right person for it. There is no expectation that you will book afterwards.
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