About Me

Zoe C Smith

Psychotherapist, Clinical Supervisor & Writer
Founder of Lone Wolf Therapy Services

You've probably read dozens of therapist profiles already.

Most of them say similar things.

So let me tell you what might matter instead.

I've been working as a counsellor and psychotherapist for over 16 years. I established my private practice in 2012 after completing a First Class BSc (Hons) in Counselling & Psychotherapy, and my experience has included private practice, community counselling services and organisations such as Mind.

My professional training includes Humanistic Integrative Psychotherapy, Somatic Trauma Therapy, Solution Focused Brief Therapy and Clinical Supervision. I provide online psychotherapy informed by this training and my clinical experience, adapting my approach to the individual rather than working to a fixed therapeutic model.

But qualifications are only part of the story.

photo of Zoe C Smith, psychotherapist and clinical supervisor at Lone Wolf Therapy Services

I've done my own work too

I've arrived at this way of working through both clinical experience and my own life.

I understand what it is to become so organised around other people's needs and expectations that it becomes difficult to hear your own voice. I also understand what it is for a life that once made sense to be disrupted, leaving you unsure who you are now or what comes next.

My own experience has taught me that understanding the past can matter, but understanding alone doesn't necessarily create a different life.

Some of the most significant changes I've experienced have come through learning to trust my own responses, becoming curious about what feels right for me, and gradually putting more of my attention into the life in front of me.

That experience has influenced the therapist I've become, alongside more than sixteen years of clinical work and continued professional training.

How I think about therapy
I don't believe therapy should make you more dependent on therapy.

My role isn't to become the expert on you, or to prescribe what a well-lived life should look like. It's to help create the conditions in which you can understand yourself more clearly, reconnect with your own preferences and capacities, experiment with what might be different, and increasingly trust yourself to decide what comes next.

Relationship is an important part of that. Sometimes we need another person alongside us to see something we can't yet see ourselves, to offer another perspective, or simply to provide somewhere safe enough to think, feel and become curious.

But the work ultimately belongs to you.

Therapy isn't something I do to you. It's something we participate in together, with what happens in your life between sessions being every bit as important as what happens within them.

I draw on humanistic-integrative, relational, somatic and solution-focused ideas rather than asking every person to fit the same therapeutic model. What matters is what is useful for the individual sitting in front of me.

My Philosophy of Working

Lone Wolf isn't about isolation or believing that we should be able to do everything alone.

I think there are times in most people's lives when we feel alone, even when we have good relationships around us. Adversity can be isolating. Shame in particular can convince us that we're the only person struggling, or that everyone else knows how to manage life in a way that we somehow don't.

But being alone isn't always the same as being lonely.

Sometimes our relationships change. Our circumstances change. We outgrow roles, environments or ways of living that once fitted us. There can be an uncomfortable space between what we've left and whatever comes next.

I don't necessarily see those periods of solitude as something to fix. Sometimes stepping outside the structures that have defined us gives us an opportunity to hear ourselves more clearly, discover what has changed and begin to decide what we want to take with us into the next part of our lives.

For me, a healthy wolf isn't one who needs nobody. It's one capable of both autonomy and connection.

The aim isn't to live without a pack. It's to be able to belong with others without abandoning yourself in order to belong.

Qualifications & Professional Experience

Qualifications

Post Graduate Certificate in Clinical Supervision
Relational Change

BSc (hons) Counselling & Psychotherapy, First Class
The Sherwood Psychotherapy Training Institute
Validated by Coventry University. Accredited by BACP

Professional Memberships

British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP)
Member

Selected Professional Training

Solution Focused Brief Therapy

BRIEF

Certificate Program in Traumatic Stress Studies
Trauma Research Foundation

Somatic Trauma Therapy

Cambridge Body Psychotherapy Centre, with Babette Rothschild

Foundations in Polyvagal Practice
Polyvagal Institute