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Lorraine Collins is a psychotherapist who came to this line of work the long way round. She spent her early career in advertising, then in the music industry, before retraining and spending formative years in the NHS, where she worked with complex cases including borderline personality disorder and generalised anxiety disorder.
Based in private practice in Central London, Lorraine is an accredited integrative psychotherapist and cognitive behavioural therapist with over fifteen years of clinical experience. She is a registered member of the BACP and the BAATN, and holds an MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and a BSc in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
It was the pace of those early advertising and music years тАУ the long hours and accumulated stress, the slow wearing-down that high-pressure work does quietly while youтАЩre too busy to notice тАУ that brought her to her own burnout. This experience is what led Lorraine to psychotherapy.
Burnout now sits at the centre of her practice: not only the workplace kind, but the deeper, less-discussed exhaustion that comes from relationships. The invisible labour of difficult family dynamics, and the particular weight of the mother-daughter bond, is the subject she writes and speaks about most.
Her work has never stayed inside the consulting room. She has given her time to community trauma support, and during the pandemic she founded an online drug and alcohol support group that has since grown into a global community, still running today, still a lifeline for people in recovery around the world.
Lorraine contributes to Good Housekeeping and ELLE as a psychotherapist, and her writing and expertise have featured in HarperтАЩs Bazaar,TIME, Stylist and Breathe. Editors and producers come to her for commentary on relational and workplace burnout, the mother-daughter dynamic, and the pressures of modern life, and she has spoken on panels on these themes too. She brings to each a clinical grounding matched by genuine personal understanding.
Much of her own thinking about recovery has been worked out at her allotment. ItтАЩs where she writes about gardening as something closer to a practice than a pastime, about what tending to growing things does for an overstimulated nervous system, and about the idea that therapy doesnтАЩt only happen in a therapy room. ItтАЩs also where she did a great deal of her own healing alongside her mother, the relationship at the heart of her work.
Lorraine is currently completing her debut book on relational burnout: a way out for anyone still in it. Alongside it, she is growing The Assembly, a wellbeing community for women who are tired not from doing too little, but from giving too much, for too long, to everyone but themselves.
