Madeleine Heffernan, BACP

Madeleine Heffernan offers help for stress, anxiety, depression, trauma and abuse, relationship or family tensions, addiction concerns, grief and intimacy-related difficulties. She also supports people coping with career change, parenting strain, compassion fatigue and ADHD-related challenges. Madeleine works with a wide range of related issues such as body image, communication problems, codependency and chronic illness concerns.

Madeleine takes a flexible approach and adapts the work to each person. Sessions include listening, guided conversations and practical tasks to try between meetings. She draws on models that look at past experiences, current thoughts and emotional patterns to make sense of difficulties and build new ways of coping.

Her practice combines Attachment-Based ideas, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Emotionally-Focused Therapy alongside mindfulness and psychodynamic perspectives. That mix means she can help people understand patterns rooted in early relationships, notice unhelpful thinking, and work with strong emotions in the moment.

Madeleine is registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, which is shown as BACP. She has eight years of experience working with adults in the United Kingdom.

Sessions are offered in English and are delivered online by video call, phone, live chat or text-based messaging. International clients are not accepted. Madeleine uses a subscription-based session model that can be cancelled at any time.

Approaches that shape online work

Madeleine uses Attachment-Based ideas to help people understand how early relationships influence current patterns. This work often looks at how trust, closeness and avoidance show up in everyday interactions and relationships.

She also draws on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which helps identify unhelpful thoughts and behaviours and then test new ways of thinking and acting. CBT is useful for stress, anxiety and low mood because it breaks problems into manageable steps.

Emotionally-Focused Therapy is part of her toolkit for intense relationship and intimacy issues. EFT focuses on recognising core emotions, naming them and using that awareness to change unhelpful interaction cycles.

Finding the right approach is part of the early sessions. Madeleine works collaboratively to match methods to a person's goals, needs and preferences, and may combine techniques from different models as the work progresses.

Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat and text-based messaging. Video helps recreate face-to-face dialogue, phone sessions are handy when bandwidth is limited, live chat can suit shorter check-ins and messaging supports ongoing reflection between sessions. These options make therapy more flexible, so appointments can fit around work, caregiving or other commitments.