Our Team

Nicky describes herself as an ‘imperfect yet loving mother of two beautiful young adult children with a unique skill for working with family systems struggling with a broad spectrum of presenting challenges’. She has post graduate education, experience in working therapeutically with children and adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse using trauma informed assessment and interventions aimed at containment, harm minimisation and trauma reprocessing with a strong focus on attachment and narrative therapy approaches aimed at moving towards a story of hope and resilience. Adept at providing a safe, secure therapeutic alliance with diverse client groups in a safe, trauma sensitive environment aimed at building trust and security needed to  unpack challenging disclosures, relationship history, behaviours and attachment patterns resulting from difficult history and  work through poor attachment patterns resulting from early trauma.  Nicky has a warm, open and curious clinical approach. Her commitment to lifelong learning is evident through ongoing post graduate training and clinical supervision, professional network partnerships aimed at providing the best practice, evidence based, clinical approaches to reflect her professional value of integrity, respect and social justice.

While content in seeing children, adolescents, couples and families both in person and online, Nicky will happily hop into a plane at a moment’s notice and fly to some of the most remote locations within Australia in order to provide on the ground front line critical incident and crisis management [including forensic]. Her energy and passion for working with diverse client groups in geographically isolated contexts, she will explain, is borne from nearly sixteen years spent as a defence wife raising children often without the physical or direct emotional support of her husband or family during remote posting locations and deployments. These experiences inspired Nicky to specialise in regional, rural, remote clinical social work practice – this has coalesced into highly developed clinical skills in psychosocial assessment, crisis intervention, problem solving, crisis and  case management skills both as an individual practitioner and as part of medical multidisciplinary model of care.

Nicky has furthered her post graduate training in family law/fdv family Dispute Resolution and mediation practice. She is a couples therapist and specialises in Emotionally Focussed Therapy (EFT) with couples using transformative mediation during couples who are experiencing precontemplation around formal separation and who are trying to work towards child focused parenting plans and living arrangements during subsequent stages of separation and divorce. Nicky has subsequently completed two more years of psychotherapy training [family therapy] to work with the whole system of family functional issues including communication issues, FDV, Child safety, family law, separation and family assessment.

Nicky has extensive experience in complex discharge planning, guardianships, elder abuse and My Aged Care.

Registrations and Memberships

• Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW)
• Family Dispute Practitioner
• Mental Health Academy
• Resolution Insitute