Meet Vida
Compassionate Care, Professional Expertise
Vida is the dedicated principle behind the R4-Therapy, she is committed to guiding you to a happy and calm life journey.
Vida’s professional background is impressive, but if you spend any time with her, it quickly becomes clear that this is not what she leads with. For her, the human connection matters most. The letters after her name are there to give you confidence that you are in safe hands, but it is the way she listens, notices, and stays alongside you that really makes the difference.
She often works with people who feel they should be coping better than they are. The ones who have read the books, tried to be rational, maybe even had therapy before, and are still living with the same cycles of stress, conflict or emotional pain. R4Therapy exists partly for those people, and Vida sits at the heart of it.
About Vida
Professional Background, In Real Life Terms
Vida’s training is not an afterthought, it is the foundation she stands on. She holds an MA in Women and Child Abuse Studies, a Diploma in Clinical Hypnotherapy with Distinction, and advanced training in trauma, emotional regulation, and mental health psychology. She has also worked for more than twenty years in healthcare as a Clinical Nurse Practitioner and Safeguarding Practitioner within the NHS.
Taken together, that mix gives her a very particular perspective. She understands how systems work, hospitals, services, referral pathways, policies. She also understands what it is like to be the person inside those systems, trying to make sense of what has happened to you while still getting on with ordinary life.
Since 2018, Vida has focused on providing therapy for trauma and recovery, drawing on both her academic knowledge and her frontline experience. She is used to thinking about risk, safety, and the long shadow of difficult experiences. That is one reason she is so careful about the pace and structure of the work she does with clients.
In 2023 she completed her hypnotherapy training journey with The Surrey Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy, obtaining the highest level of diploma qualification and passing with honours. That training sits alongside her nursing and safeguarding work, giving her a practical way to work with the subconscious mind and the nervous system, not just with thoughts and behaviour on the surface.
Ethos, What Matters Most In The Room
If Vida had to sum up her ethos in a single line, it would be this, therapy should be safe, empowering, and centred on the client.
Safe means more than just “nothing bad happens”. It means you are not pushed faster than your system can handle, that your history is taken seriously, and that your limits are respected. It also means that safeguarding is not just a tick box for her, it is something she has lived with for years in clinical practice.
Empowering, for Vida, is not about cheerleading. It is about helping you recognise what has already kept you going, making sense of your patterns, and giving you practical ways to influence how you feel and respond. That might involve working directly with the nervous system, with emotional memory, or with the stories you tell yourself about what is possible.
Client centred sounds like a cliché, but she treats it as a discipline. Sessions are shaped around you, not around a rigid protocol. She brings ideas and frameworks, of course, but she does not assume she knows best. You are the expert on your own experience. Her job is to bring curiosity, structure, and clinical judgement to that experience so something can shift.
How Vida Works
In the room, Vida is calm, steady, and quite direct in a gentle way. She is not interested in impressing you with jargon. She is much more interested in whether you feel understood and whether the work you are doing together is actually helping.
A session with Vida is likely to include some combination of:
- Exploring the patterns that show up across different parts of your life, not just in one isolated problem.
- Noticing how your body responds, as well as what you think, because trauma and long term stress live in the nervous system as much as in the mind.
- Using hypnotherapy to reach the deeper layers where emotional learning sits, so change does not rely solely on willpower.
- Linking what you are doing in therapy to the realities of your day to day life, relationships, and responsibilities, so it feels grounded rather than abstract.
She is also comfortable with complexity. If things do not fit neatly into a box, she will not try to force them. Instead, she will sit with the uncertainty and help you untangle what is going on at a pace that feels manageable.
Who She Tends To Work With
Vida’s background means she is particularly well placed to work with people whose struggles did not start yesterday. That might include those living with the impact of abuse, neglect, or chronic stress, people balancing caring roles with their own mental health, or individuals whose relationships have become tangled up with old wounds.
R4Therapy has a strong focus on relationships, both with others and with yourself, so many of her clients arrive with questions about partnership, family, trust, or intimacy layered on top of trauma or long term emotional strain. They are often thoughtful people, sometimes high functioning on the surface, who nevertheless feel stuck in repeating patterns.
You do not need to have a perfectly clear label for what you are going through to work with Vida. What matters more is that you are willing to be honest about your experience and open to the idea that change might involve both understanding and new emotional learning, not just more information.
Why R4Therapy, And Where Vida Fits
R4Therapy grew out of a sense that many people, both therapists and clients, were being left to join the dots on their own. There is a lot of talk about trauma, attachment, nervous system regulation and mind body work, but not always a clear way to translate that into day to day practice.
Vida’s role in R4Therapy is to help build that bridge. She brings her clinical background, her safeguarding lens, and her hypnotherapy training together to create approaches that are both compassionate and rigorous. The aim is to move beyond vague reassurance and into work that genuinely helps people reclaim their lives.
She is particularly keen that clients do not feel blamed for their symptoms or their history. Instead, the focus is on understanding how your mind and body learned to cope, then supporting them to learn something new.
Working With Vida
If you choose to work with Vida, you can expect a process that is thoughtful rather than rushed. The first conversations are usually about understanding what has brought you here, what you have already tried, and what “better” might realistically look like for you.
From there, you will agree a focus together. That might be stabilisation and emotional regulation, reshaping how your nervous system responds to triggers, or working with specific patterns in your relationships. Whatever the focus, you will be invited into the process as an active participant, not a passive recipient of treatment.
Over time, many people working with Vida describe feeling more grounded, more able to understand their own reactions, and more able to make choices that actually support them, rather than repeating old loops.
If that kind of work is what you are looking for, and if her blend of clinical experience and human warmth speaks to you, then meeting Vida might be a meaningful next step.